Diwali Get-Together in our office

We had a Diwali get-together in our office. A small one from 4 till 4:30. The invitation for it said that we need to come prepared with Diwali stories from our past. Hmmmm.......

Anyways, some interesting tid-bits from it:

• It is used to celebrate victory of Good over Evil. That is the easiest one.
• Some use Rangoli to decorate their house during Diwali
• As a student, some guys used to hate Diwali Homework.
• Diwali Wishes change with years
• When we were young: New clothes
• Mid Age: Celebration through crackers
• Now: Sleep - Agony of engineers
• In south in some places, first diwali after marriage the guy goes to the girls house. He is treated like a King there. WoW or Duh
• You are woken up at 2 in the morning by the elders who put oil on you and then you bathe and so on - happens in south
• Time to thank for everything you are gifted by God with
• Time to thank God for so many people whose blessings are with you
• Lots of sales at lots of places
  

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.

Try these good things out

Some good habits which we should incorporate in our everyday life:

1. Develop a habit to look at a list at the start of the day and end of the day
1. This will help in putting things which are in your basket immediately to this list at any point in the day and get you a reminder at the end-of-the-day
2. Try to learn one good thing everyday and note it down
3. Learn to tell good things to others if you think so
4. Try to concentrate on the thing you are doing and put it to a logical end to carry it on at a later stage, if there is a need to take a break in betweenPlan your financial in terms of targets to achieve twice an year
5. Do a small review of your financial at the start of the month
6. Spend some time during the week on how to build your wealth for short term

Mere Doston Mere Pass Aao

Mr. Natwarlal

This famous song from Mr. Natwarlal (An Amitabh Blockbuster release in 1979) reminded me once more of the enormous things one can learn from Bollywood.

Mere Doston Mere Pass Aao, Ek Kissa Suno

Amitabh calls on the kids to come and what follows is a brilliant story, only in a way Amitabh can do. Sung by him, it reminds me of the kisse kahanian (stories) that Grandmothers have in store for the younger ones and they need one every night.

Deewar

Similarly a scene from Deewar wonderfully summarizes how adjustments in relations can be equally happy for both parties. Amitabh is shown as a person who does not enter temple but always goes with his mother to the temple. He would stand at the footsteps of the temple. His mother offers him prashad from the temple. Amitabh is reluctant to take it and what follows is a dialogue from Shashi Kapoor which I can never forget:

Shashi Kapoor: Bhai, Maa isey prashad samajh kar deti hai, tum bhi mithai samajh kar kha liya karo.

Bluffmaster

Scene from Bluffmaster which defines love.

Abhishek to Priyanka: Na hasata hai, na rulata hai. Iska matlab abhi tak dil par kuch bhi asar nahin kar paya hai.

Love without emotions and its high and downs would be so cheyyyyy

There are numerous other scenes from the Bollywood movies, each of which has a story to tell. Love Bollywood and love the stories it has :)

Guru

There is a scene in Guru where Aishwarya is expecting a baby and standing in front of the mirror. Abhishek keeps his head on her stomach. Aishwarya asks "Kuch sunai de raha hai?" Then Abhishek (who is more fatter than usual in this movie, maybe for this scene) stands in front of the mirror and Aishwarya keeps her head on his stomach.

Abhishek: "kuch sunai de raha hai?"
Aishwarya: "Bahut kuch"
Abhishek: "Kya?"
Aishwarya: "Ismein mujhe bahut se logon ki awaaz sunai de rahi hai jo keh rahe hai ki hamein kaam do"

Talking about an inspiring scene for someone who wants to open a company for the well being of the nation. You cannot beat the above one.

My personal guide to Investing In Stock Markets

Are you planning to invest in stock markets? Thinking about making money and doing well. Here is my personal guide which I use to invest:

Divide your money into different funds at the start of the year. This will help you in setting targets and achieving them.

Planned Equity Fund: Money that you plan to invest into Equity at the end of the year. For me, the first year end target was 75,000

Planned Mutual Fund: Money that you plan to invest into Mutual Funds at the end of the year. For me, the first year end target was 75,000

Shopping Fund: Extra money that should be ready to be invested when market goes down. Keep a cap on it and do not be greedy when the market goes down.

Non Performing Assets: Take a regular look at the non-performing assets in your portfolio. The duration after which you review these assets would depend on how much time you can spare for your portfolio. Try to remove the non-performing assets and replace them with something which grows faster.

Year End Target: How much do you want your money to grow by at the end of the year? For me, I wanted my money to grow 15% at the end of the year. Conservative by todays estimates, but as a fresh entrant to the stocks, I wanted to play it safe.

Now the strategy is simple:

Invest in stock market through the shopping fund when market goes down.
Refill the shopping fund when the market goes up.
Keep the shopping fund constant.
Do not worry if Planned Equity Fund exceeds Planned Mutual Fund as long as the combination of two is below your limits. Equity is better if you know basics about stocks and have a good GUT feeling about stocks which you can back. For ex. My Equity Fund is more Loaded right now that Mutual Fund but I have a little more faith in my equity skills than choosing mutual funds.

If the planned fund goes above limits, then get it back to planned levels as soon as you get a chance. You will always have funds in your portfolio that are not giving returns as expected. Take a decision and get rid of them. DISCIPLINE your investments.

This can change the way we work!

The thing which we discussed (and I will go into the details a little later) today can completely change the way we work, only if we execute it. We have tried doing it some months back and it fell flat. The adrenalin flows for a day normally for these things and then everything comes back to the same level. Anyways, its good that we find the courage to discuss it again because if we are able to win this one, we would have what we call a "World Class Team"

What we did today was come up with a list of positive and negative points about the way we work? We are a bunch of guys who wanna work hard, do some good stuff and make money. We have been working together for around 3 years now and know quite a few things about each other.

Positive:

1. We are very fort right with each other. We say if any other person is doing wrong at his face and that is the hallmark of a good team.
   
2. We are almost at the same frequency.
3. Koi angrez nahin hai humme se, no doc / ppt only guy
4. We all want to work technically even after 5-8 years experience, so we can be very efficient
5. None of us is a politician
6. We have trust in each other
7. We are open to sharing our knowledge if the other person asks
8. Despite of cribbing and criticizing everything, we continue to work hard.

Negatives:

1. We speak in hindi even in meetings where people who do not understand hindi are present.
2. We are negative in our thoughts.
3. We look to criticize everything.
4. We do not focus.
5. We talk a lot and waste time.
6. We mix emotions with logic.
7. We do not show interest in meetings in which we are not interested.
8. Somo of us do not want to do Docs / testing
9. We do not take proper initiatives, we want to be managed by someone.
10. We want that every decision should be made after asking us, which is not possible.
    

People with Time Vs People with Talent

Karwa Chauth

October 29, 2007 was the day when the moon decided to play hide and no seek with the ladies in India. Karwa Chauth is a festival in India where the married ladies keep a fast and pray for long lives of their husbands. One of the infinite reasons why I love my wife :)

Some sound bytes from this festival:

Couple of years back on Karwa Chauth, the moon was not shining bright. Question asked: Why does the moon not shine so bright on Karwa Chauth?

Because there is so much demand for the moon, the voltage drops :)

Interesting ways to teach

We had a presentation from one of the new persons who has joined the team on a topic. He is going through the specifications and he had to explain one part of the specification to us. There are two things which are kind of blocking his speed of progress:

1. He is a fresher, so everything is new for him
2. He is reading a specification which assumes you have some previous knowledge about things and he has none

After the presentation, there was a look of exasperation on his face - I start at one point in the specification and end up somewhere else.

Now how to you make his learning process interesting?

It is always good to relate some new thing to something you already know. For ex. A person who has been for 5 years in the industry would relate a new project work to one of the older projects he has already worked on.

What does a fresher relate to?

He cannot relate to anything because he knows nothing. So it is important for his mentor to help him relate to things he might already know. For ex. he asked a question during the interview which was: What is preamble and how is it used?

Now preamble are certain bits of information which are used to separate two frames from each other. When we switch on a mobile, it might be switched on within a frame but we need to know the start of the frame. So mobile keeps waiting for the preamble to know the start of the frame.

Now the fresher knows neither preamble nor is right now comfortable with the notion of a frame.

BUT he knows cricket. Now how does cricket come in between all this?

To answer the question above, an over in cricket is like a frame and preamble is like taking a break between the overs.

When we switch on a mobile, it might be switched on within a frame but we need to know the start of the frame. So mobile keeps waiting for the preamble to know the start of the frame.

CHANGES TO

When we switch on the TV, it might be in between an over but we need to know when a new over starts. So we keep waiting for the break to know when a new over starts.

I BET HE WILL NEVER FORGET THIS ONE :)

Its does more bad than good

We have been taking interviews during the past few months for recruiting people to our company. There are many things we test people on. In addition to the technical details, there are lots of inter-personal things which come into play when you are being recruited to work in a team. In all these things, it does MORE BAD THAN GOOD to all who speak what they do not mean. For ex. We generally ask a person how comfortable he is on a topic before asking relevant questions on the topic. Based on his assessment, we then start from a certain level of questions and then go into easier or difficult ones. Now, if a person rates himself 7 out of 10 and then is not able to answer questions that I expect a person at rating 3 out of 10 to answer, then either I am expecting too much or he is thinking too highly for himself. Anyways, at the end of the day it is the other person looking out for a job. Being open on what you know and what you do not know is the BEST way to behave in an interview because there would alway be things which you would KNOW and things which you would DO NOT KNOW. So whats the harm in admitting it. Follow it up that you are more than willing to learn things which you do not know (of course only if YOU ARE READY to do this).

As the Aussies team have repeatedly said throughout the series:

Your words should be backed by your actions. It leaves a bad taste if only words flow and actions do not follow.

How tough is it to manage?

Day before yesterday we had our weekly status meeting. A fresher has joined our group and he is reading the specifications to get to pace. As he is a fresher and because he is reading any specifications for the first time, he is bound to have quite a few questions. So our manager assigns a person to help him in his queries. There are four persons in our group who could be assigned as freshers. While asking the fresher to be proactive and ask wherever he gets stuck, he asked him to collate all this questions and ask them once a week to whoever is his mentor. Huhhhh. Once a week :) By the time a week passes, things would be all confused within his brain. Ofcourse, if he starts asking whenever he wants to, that also is not the best way.

So what could be the best solution?

Ask the mentor how much times a week he would like to get interrupted?
Would he like fresher walking in without notice, with some notice or at some fixed time in the day?
Any other concern he might have!

Ask the fresher what he would be comfortable in?

Would he love to ask whenever he has a doubt?
Would he like to consolidate questions once a day / few days and then ask?

As a manager, the next step for you would be to find a middle path that makes both of them happy. Going by past experience, you would definitely be able to find one.

Ek Bhi Nahin

A friend of mine has two kids. Once when they happened to be out of house, a guest came to their house and they were received by the kids. The kids invited them to drawing room and made them comfortable on the sofas. Those were the days of KBC - a popular game show on TV where Amitabh Bachchan used to play a game with the people where he used to ask them questions and give them four options to chose. The kids were impressed and decided that it was time they played KBC. So they asked the guests:

Aap kitne gilas paani piyenge? Inmein se ek chuniye

1. 1 Glass
2. 2 Glass
3. 3 Glass
4. Ek bhi nahin

The guests said "2 Glass" (The husband and wife had come and both were thirsty). The kids (in Amitabhh style):

Bilkul Galat Jawaab. Sahi jawaab hai "Ek bhi nahin"

Performance Metrics for kids

Performance Metrics for kids - yup, thats true. They do exist, at-least in India. A colleague of mine is going through the admission process for his kid (2 and a half years old) in school. Following are some of the expectations schools have from a 2 and a half year kid:

• He should know the different colors
  
• He should know counting (more he knows better metrics he has)
• Should know A for Apple....

How do they test it?

They gave him a sketch to color which had a shape of mango on it. Now with this test, two things are tested in the kid:

• Whether he is able to recognize that the thing drawn on the sheet is a mango
• Whether he is able to remember that mango is yellow in color
  
• And if he does manage to pass these two, whether he is able to color it properly

Wew.......

As soon as the kid becomes one year old, it is common practice to start teaching him A for Apple, 1 to 10 etc. Everyone who will pick the kid up in their arms will try to teach him at-least one good thing. Its nice but its a little worrying. As long as you find innovative ways of doing it, great, otherwise, take care.......

Chote Bache (Kids)

There is a popular saying in Hindi - Chote Bache bhagwaan ke samaan hote hai (Kids are like God). This is True. And kids are funny too. Just watching their actions can be an experience in itself. A friend of mine narates great stories about his kids behavior at house. Some instances below:

• Ok, bye, thankyou - This is his ending statement after he is done with his talk on the phone.
• Chup ho ja nahin to bhaga kar shaadi kar lunga - This is the effect serials have on kids today. One of my friends tells that his nephew uttered this to his teacher. There wasn't anything funny after he said that though :)
• One of my nieces has a wonderful style of sleeping. She will put her legs in the air and sleep. Just looking at her makes it look funny.
• Ofcourse you cannot beat the kids at anything. One of my relatives son was shouting. I thought I could beat him at that. You bet. He beat me hands down.
• Papa, party: A colleague of mine used to take his son to the marriages they attend. Once they took him to a birthday party and now his son has changed his request from "Papa, shaadi" to "Papa, party"
• Try teaching A for Apple to them....... Send me a message if you are able to teach them without loosing your cool
• Bhaiya school jaayega - That was mine favorite when I was a kid
  

Different people, different reactions

Different people have different reactions to the same piece of news. This is quite common knowledge and I also completely endorse this fact. This was proved once again after this press release from CISCO declaring that is is buying Navini. For a brief background, CISCO is one of the biggest players in networking domain. Navini is a startup working on WiMAX (a part of Networking).

My reaction: Thats good for the technology. It has found an important supporter in CISCO. It is good for me because I am working on WiMAX and CISCO buying Navini means I am most probably working on the technology of the future.

A business friend of mine - his reaction: CISCO bought Navini for $330 million. Navini is such a small company. $330 million sounds cool - huh.....

One on One

It is a great learning experience to be in a Team. You know so many different ways of thinking about a thing that it amazes sometimes. Human Resource has always been an interesting aspect of management and more so in the world of Technology where everything is in the brain. If you cannot keep your employees happy, you are not tapping the potential of their brains to create value for your company. It is AS SIMPLE AS THAT. As part of ensuring you turn out fire before it spreads, managers and top management have what is known as One on One.

One on One is basically a meeting where an employee sits with his manager and discusses (almost everything which falls into the realms of discussion). It is meeting where in general it is assumed that there will be focus on things which are contentious, things which might be negative about you. This knowledge about what could be in hold for you prepares you in advance. There is nothing wrong because if you do not know you are in a hole, you will never get out of it.

So I had these one-on-one meetings with my top management some days back. Now as it turned out, it was different from one-to-one. It was two-to-one, as top management and my manager were both sitting there to discuss the things with me. There can be both negative and positives about this move which form the basis of a different blog post, but here are some excerpts from the meeting.

1. The Top Boss set the agenda for the meeting saying that he wanted to hear more of negatives than positives so that we can improve. Positives are already there and so nothing special to discuss.
2. My manager spoke about me - well he spoke nothing but positive things about me. I think this is not quite right considering this is once a while opportunity to tell what can be corrected. My fault I did not go out of my way to encourage him to do that.
3. My turn and some things which I think we can improve:
1. We are involved in decision making too late. It is common knowledge in software world that the later you change a wrong decision in a project, the more costlier it is.
2. We should get the buy-in of the stakeholders. I read it somewhere and I think it holds true for all teams - For any deal to be successful, it is very important to have buy-in of all stakeholders. If people feel it is their decision, they will go to any extent to make sure it is successful.
3. It is not a coalition government. You need to think what is best for the company. If everyone agrees, it is ideal. If some agree, it is good. If none agree, then change your decision as it will never work.
4. Everyone loves good work, so be careful while taking decisions. Different people have different mindsets, so you need to balance it. Managing people is almost a full time job if you want to do it well.
   

Theres something wrong in Google search!

There is something wrong in the way Google is returning my search results. I gave a string of 'VaibhavMadan Ladoo' for Google to search. It came up with two results - one of them was what I was expecting. So far, so good. Now I open the search result I am interested in and go onto that page. I expect my search keyword to be present in that page. But IT IS NOT. I am not sure what search algorithm Google used, but whatever it was it did not give me the perfect answer. Now my gut feeling on how it worked:

I read somewhere that google also indexes the links within a page. In the search result I got in my example, the keywords are not directly present on the page returned by Google but they are there in one of the pages for which a link was there. Now I think that Google also searched those links within the pages and happened to return this page. Because I knew exactly where the keywords are, I was able to go to the page where the intended result is. But if I do a random search (and that is what happens most of the time) I would never be able to guess this.

GOOGLE GUYS, ARE YOU LISTENING?

Or maybe, a chance for a competitor of Google to distinguish themselves from Google.

I would not really be happy if the keyword itself is not present in the page I open after a search result. RIGHT PATH TO THE WRONG DESTINATION ......

Pilot Project

I tried to search the web to understand the meaning of Pilot Project. I could not a satisfactory answer. But somehow this term has found its entry into the dictionary of our office as something which is being tried by a person for the first time. To elaborate, it is something which you are trying your hands on for the first time and it is not your forte till now, but you would like it to be. For ex. A software engineer who has been into testing and wants to move into development would consider his / her first development project as a Pilot Project which would launch him / her into the world of Development.

Not sure who is responsible for generating the term, but it has consumed a major portion of our lunch time discussions and has been the centre of lots of our office humour.

Kehat vaibhav suno bhai entrepreneur
Pilot Project ki leela se bacho dear

It is very funny!

We had gone to see Bhool Bhulaiya yesterday. As we had some time left for the show, we started doing some shopping and bought a T-Shirt for me. We took it along with us to the cinema hall. We were greeted at the cinema hall entrance by an employee of the hall who refused to allow us entry as we were carrying a poly with the T-Shirt in it. He requested us to go to the Basement and come back as we still had time for the movie (He had not looked at our tickets till now and yet he knew we had time left for the movie to start. I must admit he was a smart guy - all pun intended). We were in no mood to go 4 floors down to the basement just to put a T-Shirt at a counter and come back. I took the T-Shirt out, put it on and we moved inside. All this happened in front of the guy and he managed a small smile on his face. Seems funny and it is - however the purpose is all lost and suddenly the decision to not allow people to carry polythenes inside theatre seems absurd. They should put up some machinery to check that out. It is not that tough, I believe ................

What certain time means to someone?

I happened to call an Indiabulls representative at 3:25 in the afternoon. Following is an excerpt from the conversation:

Me: Hi Dheeraj, I am Vaibhav calling from Mayur Vihar.
Dheeraj: Hello Sir. (Thinks about a few seconds and then remembers)
Me: I was thinking about opening an account.
Dheeraj: Sir, Can I callback you in 5 minutes. Markets are closing

3:30 in the afternoon is the time when markets in India stop trading, so 3:30 has a special significance in Dheerajs life.

Similarly, in the good old golden days when we used to go to the school, 1:30 in the afternoon was something we waited for. After all, it was the time school closed. This time changed to 2:15 in the winters when the school started late.

People who used to work in the mills waited eagerly for the BELLS to sound at 6 in the evening. You could see bicycles in plenty coming out of the big doors which never seemed to be big enough.

Times of day at a multiple of 3 used to be of significance to movie goers in the past. Shows used to start in theatres at 12, 3, 6 and 9 before multiplexes came in.

After I turned into a Software Engineer, these times have lost their significance. There are not BELLS ringing for me to go home, no time for market to close :)