For those who missed the bus…

Indian equity market is providing one of those very rare ’second chances’ for those who missed the bus first time. An extended opportunity (some predicts upto several quarters from now) in which good value stocks are available at a price points they were almost a year ago. The real value has only increased in the meanwhile for many of them.

Leadership and Management

 

The 2008 railway budget of India was presented by Union Minister Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav recently.  The points which stood out to me: 

• The railways had a  cash surplus of Rs 25000 crore in FY08 with an operating ratio of 76%.
• Fare cuts across the board. upto 7% compared to previous years’.
• Introduction of more Software based controls, Smart card ticketing, CCTV surveilance, Stainless steel coaches, escalators and lifts in stations and modern platforms.
• 53 more passenger trains.
• The Railways have Rs 80,000 crore for five years as cash surplus, The Rail Corporation’s divident stood at Rs 88.

The transformation of Indian Railway under Lalu’s rule is already an urban legend. In case you missed the action, please let me put things in perspective.

When Yadav took over, the Indian Railways was a loss-making organization. The Rakesh Mohan Committee (headed by Rakesh Mohan, secretary, department of economic affairs) had termed it a ‘white elephant’ and predicted it would hit Rs 61,000 crore (US$15.4 billion) in bankruptcy by 2015.The only solution seemed to be privatization. Source: Rediff.

Little wonder why Harward, IIM-A, HEC Management School etc use ‘Lalu effect on India Railway’ as a case study.

Many might argue that Lalu is getting undue credit for the good work of his officers. My answer to that is, a minister is the most transient thing in a public sector behemoth like IR, given that one gets to be a minister only for 5 years while his officers spend nearly their entire working life time at office. No questions or doubts about the capability of the employees of the firm though. Railways always had good employees and managers.

This goes on to highlight the differences between a Leader and a Manager(s). Leader brings about changes. Leader provides the vision. Manager executes the vision. Manager brings in efficiencies.

To quote Steven R Covey in my own words, Manager is one who comes up with the method of cutting trees most efficiently while Leader is the one who climbs up on the tallest tree, looks around and yells ” wrong forest!”

Without a brave new vision, even the most efficient managemnent technique will be sterile. Turn-arounds are seldom the children of management. They most often take birth from leadership with new vision.

Picture courtesy: Oneman’s Blog.

Lifesavers for a Gourmet

(Picture courtesy: Shubhaytra) 

Decided to try make some authentic Kerala dishes for dinner yesterday. Ready to eats from M&S and my once-in-a-week crash-cooking has taken its toll. If there is anything worse than a forced bachelorhood, its deprivation of good food.  And hence I went in search for some nice recipes on the net.

In case I haven’t said this before, Internet (and google within it) is the biggest invention of mankind after electricity.

Here I am in an alien country, and within minutes of searching, this beautiful site comes up with the most elaborate list of the authentic celebrated recipes of my homeland, Kerala. 

Very apt that the site is named the ‘Essence of Kerala’.

Nothing captures the snapshot of a culture like its local cuisine does. Kerala, with its ancient sea-trade links with Arab, Greek, Roman and Jewish civilisations (Even the King Solomon ( 848 bc - 796bc ) is recorded to have had active trade links with Kerala for Teak and Sandalwood) developed a unique cuisine from its arya-dravida-mosepotemian-greek-roman-N.African cultural melting pot. The Chinese Buddhist missionaries contributed their part ( refer Cheena Chatti) to this evolving blend. And there emerges this mesmerising spread called kerala cuisine.

While it is so liberal in the use of spices, it is considerably milder (read less hot) compared to its other south Indian sister cuisines. A different proportion of spice-mix.

 God bless mallugirl and RP who masterminded this wonderful site!

Badminton

Had a nice game of badminton yesterday.

Sam booked a court in Kodak Sports Centre in Harrow, drove all the way from Ealing and showed up with a spare set of gears.  When he pre-empted my last resort of defence by showing another pair of badminton shoes in his car, I knew I ran out of excuses.

So in return, I made him look like a world champion with a score which read 2-15 and 0-7. To say that I was murdered in court will be an understatement.

Every inch of my body is in pain today. That’s the sado-masochist side of sports for you. I can’t wait to play again though.

As a kid, I used to watch my papa play badminton with his friends in makeshift courts on the street infront of my house. Vehicles were so rare in our village those times so the street even allowed them to tie a net across -to be untied hastly when a Jeep would want to passby. I fell in love with the game from those ages. Does’nt mean that I learned to play it well or anything. For a guy who would rather read about sports than indulge in it, an occational game or two with school friends is phenominal involvement.

Later on, the craze used to strike only when exams were near and we barely had time to go through the syllabii, and also had tons of books to cover. And out of the blue, someone would suggest a game a badminton, and we will play like there was no tomorrow. During one of our third semester exams, we played till the wee hours of the day of our first exam paper. And when the results arrived, we had our not-so-helpful internal assesments to blame.

I read somewhere that you realise what you truly love only when you think that you will die in the next hour or so. Exams served those kind of near-death feeling. I am glad we chose Badminton at that time considering our age etc

Anyway, I want to play more badminton. Hopefully twice a week. All the running, jumping and streching made me breathless . Goes on to prove it’s effectiveness as an excercise. May be we did’nt go through enough of warming up and stretching last time.

World Badminton website gives a nice array of video instructions on how to warm-up, stretch and do some upper body strength training. Plus with some vital footwork training.

Very helpful info overall.

Here’s an inspirational picture on the sport from Swiss Open ‘06.  The life and energy of the game is leaping out at you.

(Courtesy Flickr images of Shabok).

feb 14

A day to say ‘I Love you’ one more time

A day to remember how loved I am

A day to Thank God once again

For the gift called Archana.

.

Chanced Upon this poem from Alastair McIntosh.

Boating In Maine.

Some things you never lose

like when David took us sailing

sharing thoughts of poetry and form

and rowing back the tender to the pier

I twisted oars in symmetry of perfect counterpoint

an exquisitely executed turn

gliding with precision into dock

He remarked, impressed,

    and I confess a pleasing swell of pride

the thought that skill from Hebridean boyhood held its edge

    thirty years along

        this western bank

            the Great Atlantic

.

Some things you never lose

like rowing a boat

drift angled, crosswind, no great hurry

we’ll arrive, my dear, when time ordains

with strength of arms and keel of oak

as oars dip softly through the diamond sparkle of each wave

and lapping clinker rhythm dapples dancing over larch

and fathomless the melody of currents in my soul

soaring with the poetry of knowing you from inside out

singing to myself from outside in and turned back round again

at being seen by you, desired by you…

… it is your love that I’m in love with…

some things you never lose

Roots

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.

-Aristotle

Took some time this weekend to read about the roots of Syrian Christians in Kerala. A largely inconsequential exercise, yet I found myself deeply engrossed in history. In case you are intrigued too, please find more in links below.

Defining a Kerala Syrian Christian

Syrian Malabar Nasrani

It shed light to the background of so many unique customs and rituals associated with our faith and community, which are so different even from other Christian denominations of the world.

(Got the above pic from Flickr.  Quintessential Syrian Christian Architecture of Central Travancore)

..half glass full of eternity.

Love will transcend the boundaries of life. I also believe the ‘other side’ is eternal. 

Ask not for logic for the matters of heart.

The feelings and thoughts. Never expressed fully, never understood clearly yet so constant and ever present. Feelings and thoughts form a parallel world. Its already beyond the limits of body, place or time.

Some acts of kindness you recieved made your heart mild forever. Thoughts of great men reach you and live in you centuries later and will continue to do so for centuries to come.

The feeling of love and kindness. The thoughts which procreate change. What else is the  spirit of life if not the continuum of these combined?

So death, the classical sense of leaving of spirit, happens only when this continuum breaks. Otherwise, its just a change of medium. Or escaping the limitations of the medium of body.

You just stumbled upon the threshold of eternity.

Since you have reached thus far, why not read this engineer joke?

” The glass is neither half empty nor half full; its simply twice as big as it needs to be !”(got it here).

It’s well past three am. As you can see, blogging is never a good cure for insomnia.

The medicine is in the shape of a lovely lady called Archana. Cant wait !

Dec ‘07 Report- India Inc growth story

Moneycontrol gives a very good quarterly analysis of India’s industrial growth story .

The full story can be downloaded from here. Dec ‘07 Earnings Analysis by Haresh Soneji, Shravan Srinivasula and Anichya Shah.

Profit after Tax (PAT) figures still look very pretty at around 30%, albeit lower than last years dizzying heights of near 45%.

This report proves that it is still well worth wading through the myriads of ads and pop-ups cluttered all over the moneycontrol website.

(Initially the ads can distract you and irritate you. But gradually you learn to live with it.  It is much like the English weather. The nuisance is well compensated by the currency rate and earning potential. Well, atleast so far.. )

Bad people might take over your home router…

Extract from the theregister.co.uk article:

“A security researcher says he has observed criminals using a new form of attack that causes victims to visit spoofed banking pages by secretly making changes to their high-speed home routers.

According to Symantec researcher Zulfikar Ramzan, the attack changes a router’s settings controlling the domain name system server that translates domain names like theregister.co.uk into numerical IP address.

Malicious javascript code embedded into one email message he uncovered caused the URL for a popular Mexico-based bank to map to a fraudulent website controlled by the attackers. Anyone who tried to do business on the rogue site would have their banking credentials lifted. “

The GNUCITIZEN blogs describes the attack in detail here.

Disabling UPnP is one option of securing your home router (provided the box gives you an option to)

Playing back the good ol’ times

a simple piece Sreejesh taught me when we were in College, drinking our way through engineering. Years later, I would buy a guitar to re-learn and play those old times back…

Please excuse the horrible playing.. now you know I wasn’t joking when I warned you that I am buying a guitar.