Today is 2 year birthday (or should I call it Anniversary) of our company ‘Tekriti‘ as well as my blog ‘LatestInIndia‘.

Warmest wishes to all Teknokrats and thanks to all the well-wishers, friends and family. A ’surprise’ cake cutting ceremony happened in the morning - the big party is due sometime in the next month.

Update: Manish just blogged about the Tekriti T-shirts distributed on the occasion. Here is the design of the t-shirt:

Let me start with wishing everybody a very Happy and Prosperous New Year ahead. I have been very inconsistent with blogging over the last 1 month and I feel bad about that. But the reality is that I have been busy with more than a few things on the professional front (that my company board doesn’t allow me to talk about yet). Once we make sufficient progress and get the product in the ‘talkable’ state, I will write about the entire experience but, for now, I will just write my random thoughts here.

Random Thought 1: Tekriti had further expansion and rented out another office in the same building. There was a week when I didn’t have an official seat in the previous office because the new office was still getting furnished - so I kept moving from one conference room to the other with my laptop. And I used to get happy if somebody was on leave - I had a seat that way. Anyways, the new office has got a lot more corporate look - and I guess I got to change that with putting up posters and other funky things. 

Random Thought 2: I am losing interest in blogging. Seriously! I hate to be doing things that I don’t want and I have realized that I am pretty bad at things that I dont like. So, even though I was very busy, I didn’t miss blogging that much - and I did notice a little decline in my blog page views over this period (and that bothered me a bit). I also think that I have received lesser number of emails through my blog in the last 1 month. At the same time, I do think that this is just a passing phase and I will get back to my same old frequency. My blog has been fruitful in more than many ways, but I am reserving those comments for the 2 year anniversary.

Random Thought 3: I need to get more involved in the Delhi’s business circle. One disadvantage of doing a business only with overseas companies is that you don’t develop a lot of business contacts in your country. You do have mentors, appreciators, friends but business-contacts are someone that you don’t have. I believe that I need to be a little more active there. We have started to do some work in the Indian Business space (though pretty selectively) - so I do see that changing a bit over time.

Random Thought 4: I need to get more involved in the Delhi’s social circle. This is actually a continuation of Thought 3, and a more important one. Quite frankly, I think that the nature of my work is making me really boring. And I have started to get scared because of that. There are actually times when I get a little uncomfortable when I am in a place where I need to talk something apart from business, technology. That has never been my style of living and I got to maintain it that way. Oh - and if you are one of the readers who is deep into the Delhi social circle - I will appreciate you contacting me. I promise I will try not to bore you

More later…

Two of the things that I am very passionate about are Business and Cricket. Both these things have a very important role in keeping me sane and I can’t imagine my life without either. So, when I am traveling and not really doing much, I think about both these. And then this idea that ‘Business is like Cricket’ has come to my mind more than once and I thought that I will write a post on the same which will just help me organize my thoughts. The idea is not to make it funny but it might turn out to be funnier than my other posts (look, the bar is really low there).

And then the choice of the title stems from the fact that Bill Gates is one person I admire a lot. He authored “Business @ The speed of thought”. I can at least write “Business with the rules of Cricket”. Let me elaborate and I will again use bullet-points to do that:

• Starting small and having bench-strength: When a team starts to play cricket, their team size (not limited to the playing 11) is really small. The total number of players playing the game in that particular country (Kenya is an example) is so small that there isn’t much of a concept of bench strength. The better you are at the game, the better is your bench strength (Australia is the best and they have the best bench strength). Similarly for the business, the team doesn’t have any buffer (if not under-staffed) in the beginning and this only changes with time and once the team starts becoming big. The bigger team / business can also utilize the bench that much better as they can afford to spend time / money / energy there.
• Flamboyance is exciting but substance is preferred: In cricket, we all love to see Sehwag / Afridi in action more than we want to see Dravid. This is because there is an element of unpredictability / flamboyance associated with them. They can play the most atrocious shots and provide immense entertainment to the spectators but when it comes to crunch situations, Dravid is preferred over his more exciting colleagues. This is because Dravid symbolises comfort, maturity, reliability - it doesn’t mean that Sehwag / Afridi are not competent. Similarly when it comes to creating some life saving drugs, vaccine, the doctors prefer Ranbaxy more than they will prefer the smaller companies - even when there are quality checks in place. Again, this does not mean that the products from the smaller companies are any inferior - it is just the ‘comfort factor’ that makes a small company lose. And this is true for any business, not just medicines.
• Planning: This is my favorite point. Since I am most aware about the software sector, let me ask this - what do the companies like Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube provide? Features - yes! These companies are essentially ‘feature companies’ - not product companies. The success for these companies is determined by the amount of dollars they were acquired for. Mind it - I am not showing down these companies - I am just trying to emphasize that the smaller companies do not (cannot) plan as well as the bigger ones. If Flickr was not acquired by Yahoo, they wouldn’t have been called as successful as they are now. But the same does not apply for Apple or NVidia or Sun or even other medium sized companies. A lot of these smaller companies really don’t have a strong traditional business plan and people are okay with it. Similarly, the smaller and weaker cricket playing nations put in a much smaller effort planning as compared to the actual execution. Don’t they say that Australia wins half the matches before a single ball is bowled in a match of cricket? It is that planning only which makes them do that.
• You are hated for being the best / biggest: Microsoft is easily the most hated software company in the world. Similarly, Australia is the most hated team in the world cricket. Yet - people are trying various ways to walk on their path and reach as close to them as possible. And if you are the one who has the best credentials / chances of toppling the best, everybody will love and help you UNTIL you reach the top spot. Just a human nature - it is fashionable to hate the best / biggest.
• Interest among others and cost of get-togethers: This is funny and people have this complaint that the big conferences are always paid and expensive. On the top of that, there are many sponsors for that who end up paying big bucks for the big banners they put up at those conferences. On the other hand, the smaller companies like ours organize barcamps where we pay from our own pockets to sponsor the event. Similarly if a cricket player is from a team like India or Australia, there is a big queue for the businesses to sign them for advertisements while the players from Kenya / Bangladesh have to do another job to make sure they can have a decent living.

I have a few more ideas to support my point but I will save it for when I actually write a book on this To sum up - I think both these things have a lot of similarities. You start with being small in both, be more flamboyant but you always aspire to be more mature, more sophisticated, more organized and more planned. One can either be a part of the more organized and more planned organization / team or choose to start small and take the journey of maturing from a more exciting / flamboyant to more matured / reliable / planned team / organization. The choice will always remain with the individual!

Paavani forwarded me this link by the PingMag team about their post on the Website Development Process.

Something very very trivial for somebody who already understands it but their explanation for non-geeks is pretty neat. They have used some real pretty (and funny) pictures - a good read when you want to unwind. Reminds me again - the power of pictures!

This is all over the newspapers and blogs but I still wanted to salute Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar for scoring his 35th century in Test cricket. I am not really a person who believes in the concept of ‘looking up to anybody’ - but Sachin’s patience on Saturday, 10th December was marvellous. He played amazingly slow at the start of his innings - enough to put anybody to sleep if you were watching it on the TV - but decided not to give away his wicket.

35 centuries in a Test cricket to become the lead century maker - yet another world record - surpassing Sunil Gavaskar’s record is a fantastic achievement. And I WAS THERE at Ferozeshah Kotla to watch the history being created - the first time I watched a match live from the stadium. Needless to say that I felt that there was a result even on the first day of a 5-day test match.

“What is the most important thing your engineering degree has taught you?” - is the question I have come across more than a few times. Earlier I used to be asked this question and now I have also gotten into the habit of asking the same question to others.

Something that I always say is that I am a computer engineer by education and, now, an entrepreneur by profession. Note that by an entrepreneur, I mean that I am not limiting myself to a software business. I think the primary thing my engineering degree has taught me is to be able to analyze things. And this is a skill that is relevant to almost all the businesses and not just limited to software. So I really am surprised when people are surprised to see an engineer taking up a business which has nothing to do with software. After all, the role of a smart entrepreneur is not to do everything themself - but to find smart people who can be responsible for the appropriate divisions. In the light of all this - it makes perfect sense to take up a business which makes the most sense to the person - financially, for work-satisfaction and otherwise.

And one such case of an engineer doing a non-IT business is demonstrated by one of my close buddy - Animesh. He has just started his blog at MSN spaces and I look forward to reading his experiences running a retail business.

So, if you haven’t thought about it seriously, it is a time to think “what have you learnt the most from your professional degree?”

I have really been slow at blogging for the past few days. Sometimes I just feel like forcing myself to write an obligatory post so that my readers don’t go disappointed when they visit my blog. But then I have figured out that I do a real bad job when I dont put in my heart at blogging. Excuses apart - something that I have been doing for the past few days:

• Work: Oh, of course, work - not to say that the load has increased. It has always been like that but we are reaching stabilization phase in a few projects - so it requires a little more thought and involvement.
• Socializing: Because of the festival time a few weeks back - I just got in the mood of socializing with relatives and friends. It was more so after Vishal, a good friend from IIT, came to Delhi and announced that he is getting married in a couple of months. It was good to meet the soon-to-be-married Vishal and Rashi AND recently-married Rahul and Shilpi - and they tried to make sure that I don’t feel out of place.
• Watching TV: Well, I had to face disconnectivity in my internet connection because of delay in payment of my bill. It was a few days before they restored it back - but only after I had to call a few times after paying the bill. So, I had to resort to watching TV for those days - in the time reserved for reading various blogs and news articles.
• Planning for New Year: After a rather quiet New Years celebration last year, I thought that I will plan in advance for the new year this time. And I, for sure, don’t want to be in Delhi then (it being weekend also helps a lot). I have been looking at various options and zeroed down on Goa and Diu finally. I just need to decide between the two now - but it seems that getting tickets and accomodation is a big issue. I am, most likely, going to be taking a combination of flight and bus whereever I go. But I can’t understand why is there no decent service to let me do an online booking for a deluxe bus journey from one destination to the other. I hate to be on the phone with a travel agent to make such a booking.
• Health Club: Aha, we finally figured out a nice health club in Gurgaon. The name of the club is Ozone and this place looked awesome. Its quite expensive and need to pay a year’s rent in advance but I guess it’s worth it. Went to see it from inside today and have already made up my mind to join it tomorrow. I have already starting to feel good about it.
• Interviews: Because of a few new projects that we are starting, we are becoming even more aggressive in hiring. It appears that we got to look for alternate source of finding candidates. We have been really exhausting the traditional sources - but now I will worry less about that. Manish (and, now, Ashima is also here to help us) is excellent at doing that stuff.

Now, let me move from my random musings to something more focused.

I took a break from blogging the last few days and enjoyed the festival week in India. It was a good Diwali this time - I hope my relatives in and around Delhi should not have much to complain now that I paid a visit to them a few number of times over the last week. Let me start with wishing everybody a very Happy Diwali, Eid, Vishwakarma Pooja and Bhai Dooj - from Tekriti and me. I was still in the city, going to office for a few hours daily but was pretty much in the relaxing mood - only to come back with a greater energy on Monday when we are at full strength.

I got a lot of time to think and talk about things other than those directly related to Tekriti in these days. I will write about all that in the coming days but something that has got my attention is the recent bashing of BPO industry in India. Actually, let me clarify - the bashing is not for the BPO industry as such but for the effects that it has on the employees of these companies. This has got even more attention because of the recent release of the book “One night@the call center” by Chetan Bhagat whose last book “Five point someone” about 4 IIT grads became very famous.

I haven’t interacted a lot with anybody working in a call center but overall, from what I know, I think a lot of people treat these jobs as temporary jobs. These jobs are not treated as the jobs-to-retire-on by a large proportion of the call center work-force but something which is good for earning some decent salary while one is still young and is in the process of deciding what will they want to do eventually. Let me present my case on why I think the positives outweigh the negatives:

Positives:

• Employment to the youth: I am sure this has helped bringing down the unemployment rate and frustration amongst the graduating students who used to have horrible time looking for a job if they didn’t study the traditional courses.
• Positive contribution to the Indian economy and help increase foreign currency reserves: It’s a no-brainer to figure out how good are the BPO industries to the Indian economy. I won’t even talk about any details here, for the fear of repeating what others have told many times.
• Increase the spending power of a lot of Indians by virtue of providing sufficient cash to the youth who are willing to spend: If something has changed a lot in the last 10 years - it is the spending power of us Indians. That is a cause that many foreign brands are coming to Indian market and are targeting the youth of India while doing their marketing / advertisement campaigns. I don’t really have to travel to the US or outside India to get things which were traditionally available only in those places. And, even, the prices are becoming more and more attractive.

Negatives:

• Not the ideal working environment: Of course, it is not ideal working environment when people have to work night-shifts but then this is not something really new. Industrial sector is another example where this is practiced.
• Killing people’s creativity and not letting them realize their potential: I will agree with it to a large extent. Since it is substantially easier to get these jobs rather than slogging out and trying to do something different, a lot of people actually go for these jobs. Don’t we all know that “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Now, there is a case when somebody capable of doing more is not able to do that because they are doing something which was easier to get but doesn’t utilize their full potential / capabilities.

I wouldn’t have been so thoughtful about this but, then, we have 2 sufficiently large BPO companies in our building and I always see them hanging out together and having a nice time by the coffee shop - and it’s difficult not to think about them - particularly when the average beauty is on the higher side than the usual crowd that I get to witness.

So, in the light of all the positives and negatives that I talked about above, I don’t really see a problem with people working for BPOs. I almost feel like comparing a BPO job with a job in the US where people are working in a store like Safeway / Fred Meyer / Wal-mart (though I think that it requires more skill to work in a BPO than Safeway). Can’t we apply the same logic for those jobs too? So - why is there so much of a hue and cry or am I totally missing a point here?

Last weekend I was in Ahmedabad for a day and visited NID (National Institute of Design). Design schools have always fascinated me - be it the premier Indian design institutes like NID or NIFT or the other lesser known institutes. And, fortunately, I have been to both these leading institutes now and was impressed with both. NID is modelled on industrial design centers such as Bauhaus and Ulm in Germany whereas NIFT is more on the sophisticated side.

My appreciation for the design skills, designers and design schools stems from the fact that this is one skill I just don’t seem to have. I can appreciate good design and can roughly judge them based on the context but this is something I wish I was better at. And my association with design skills and designers goes 6-7 years back when I was in my pre-final year of my engineering and that was the time I was thinking about one of my first business ideas (and, actually, did some research around that).

My cousin was in NIFT then and she provided some valuable feedback to me - as I was thinking of venturing in making use of IT in Fashion Design. Now, when I think of it - it was a pretty lame idea but then were most of the ideas during the initial days of the internet and, the funny part is, people did make a lot of money on those ideas.

But, at the same time, I also have a complaint - it’s really difficult to find good web designers in India. I have seen the web designs from people in the US and UK and I think that we guys need to do a lot of catch-up to get to anywhere even near that. But if you are one of the web-designers who don’t agree with me, please contact me at ashish AT tekritisoftware DOT com. I can’t tell you how desperately I want to be proven wrong here. My company Tekriti has an opening for a wonderful web-designer but we will not fill up that position with anybody less than spectacular. It will be good to know you.

I followed the current Ashes series between Australia and England with a greater curiousity than I followed the triangular series involving India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. The reason was the superlative performance by the English team, and especially 2 folks: Andrew Flintoff and KP Pietersen. Result: England regaining the series after almost 16 years. Now, 16 years is a long enough time for a lot of people to give up - but not the current England team. Lately, Australia have been in the habit of winning - a very dangerous habit of winning all the test series in the last few years. India did give them a hard time and also managed to break their winning streak once but, overall, Australia was a far superior team than any other team.

This victory of England over Australia makes me happy. Not because I like the England team more than Australia or vice-versa but because I see yet another team who has the balls to take on Australia in a test series. Happy because this would only mean balancing of cricketing powers and, hopefully, fewer one-sided matches. Happy because, again hopefully, I get to see some less arrogance from a few members of the Australian team. Happy because the other team will, hopefully, not get as intimidated by the Australian team as has become the norm.

Now that I am on the topic of cricket - I can’t stop mentioning how hurt I was when I read an article in today’s newspaper that there is again a doubt on whether the last tri-series involving India, New Zealand and Zimbabwe was fixed or not. I think it’s actually a good sign that I still get hurt when I read news of this kind - I only fear that I will start ignoring all this if this starts becoming more frequent.

BTW, I did receieve a few compliments for the current theme at my blog. To be fair (under pressure ), let me pass on the compliments to Madhavi for the photo at the top. This was a photo that was taken by her and edited by me to fit this blog.