What I picked up from "The folly of finding what works"

“The impact of information technology on the Global Economy” was the title of my research project last semester. 2 weeks into the project and I was still finding newer things to study. Around the same time, my professor in charge advised me that I better stop searching for more topics and better get to work.

I, on the other hand wanted to make this a comprehensive study on the impact of IT. So I wanted to include Overview of the situation today, the booms and busts, the venture capitalists, web1.0, web 2.0, the long tail, Outsourcing, trickle down effect, ICT for development, mobile communications. Phew. No wait, there's more, e-commerce, e-governance, case studies of famous companies, the semiconductor industry, exports, imports, recession. Relate that to GDP, employment, education, productivity, FDI...

Did I leave out anything?

Clearly, if I did manage to include it all, I'd have a PhD thesis, which I would have sold and made money from.

Just one problem.

This would never get finished. In fact, my project wouldn't even start. I'd be so busy finding newer things to study about that I'd hardly put pen to paper and actually document anything. Instead I would just be reading and researching on every single item that was remotely related to the IT industry.

Moving on,

This May, when I started my summer internship, I was fascinated by the health care industry. In particular, primary health care. The numbers were huge and I was overwhelmed by the scale of their operations. So when I had to pick my project, I didn’t want to leave out anything. I tried to include everything, using variety of economic formulas, different theories. My internship coordinator asked me why I don’t stay for a 6 month fellowship. As flattered as I was, I also got the underlying hint. I understood that given the time frame it was unfeasible to carry out the study with so many parameters. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of all that data. So I picked one or two core areas and focused on them.

As far as personal experiences go, these were the first two instances that came to my mind while I was reading Ken Banks' blog post titled The folly of "finding what works". He brings up a very valid point:

As with the confusion caused by multiple interpretations of “sustainable development“, the social mobile space is struggling with its own definitions of concepts such as collaboration, empowerment, scale, “enabling environment” and “finding what works”. We hear these terms on a daily basis, yet we never stop to ask what they really mean. What does an “enabling environment” really look like, and do we really need one like people say we do? Who decides what scale really means, and how important scaling really is? We all nod in agreement when people use these terms at conferences, but refrain from questioning them through fear of appearing ignorant.

The “folly of finding what works” strikes particular resonance. Although mobiles for development has only been around for a few short years, surely by now we’ve identified at least a few things that work? Isn’t that the purpose of all these reports, blog posts, tweets, projects, conferences, workshops, barcamps and academic studies?

After six years-or-so of social mobile, we’re surely at the point where we can throw some real resources around at least a few tools? Surely we can pool our collective skills, knowledge and resources into helping at least a few reach their full social change potential? Instead of sitting around talking about our commitment to social mobile, we need to show our true colours and act, regardless of who gets credit for those actions.

Reading this also started another chain of thought in my head, the credit for which has to be given to Stan Thakaekara. In the course of what would turn out to be a vociferous debate on issues relating to the environment, education, caste and equity amongst other things, Stan gave us some gyaan on how he feels that technology hasn't quite lived up to its promise. How technology hasn't quite created an equitable world. How the more answers we try to seek, the farther we seem to move from actually arriving at the truth. And instead we're just making the world worse off.

But then what is the truth anyway?

Coming back, Stan was of firm belief that the divide is getting larger and larger. Technology is giving only a few answers. It's a balloon effect, where squeezing one side of a balloon makes it expand in the other direction. You can't ignore the consequences and certainly can't escape them. So we have to now come up with clean technologies in order to clean up all the mess that we created over the years* **. Jeffrey Sachs also says that it's not that we don't have fossil fuels, we have plenty of it (maybe not oil, but coal surely), its about using it in an optimized manner.

Jeez, I digress again.

When Stan first told me all this, it did strike a chord somewhere but I was still too mesmerized by capitalism. I now realize, I didn't quite understand capitalism. Maybe I still haven't. But after having read works of Jeffrey Sachs, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Joseph Stiglitz, I have been exposed to a whole new way of thinking. These guys aren't dishing out dung. They all emphasize on the same thing, there's little time.

Bottom line being:
The reforms have to take place now, the access to credit/capital for the poor has to happen now and heck social media for development better deliver now. Because everyday, a kid is losing his life in Africa (and India and Latin America and Bangladesh and...). Like Ken said, we need to stop talking and start doing now.

*Of course there are numerous theories which say that we would have reached this stage anyway even had it not been for the pollution, but lets leave that for another day.

** And then there's yet another theory that says that no matter what you do, we're way past the threshold. So we have to release chemicals in the air such as sulphates to cool our system (remember the TED talk on climate change? No? Here)

Indian Social Networking Trends

Comscore, the Global Internet information provider recently released their report on the top social networking sites in India. 

The report throws some very interesting results. To kickoff, Facebook as expected has just stormed its way into the Indian audience with a growth rate of 150%. It had 4.044 million visitors this December. Orkut is still the leader with 12 million page views this December (an increase of 81% from last year) which suggests that though Facebook is edging up, Orkut still has the masses who will probably take time to adopt to Facebook. 

However it’s interesting to notice a slump in the page views of Ibibo.com, which has been spending massive amounts on advertising and marketing this past year. The number of visitors on Ibibo dropped by 50% over the past year. Maybe the guys down at Mothership need to rethink into how to penetrate into their target audience better. They did come up with a number of contests and tie up with various college fests to gain a market share but it doesn’t seem to be working as well as they expected. Similar results are portrayed by Big Adda which has also had a decreased traffic rate of 25%.

Hi5 on the other hand has had the highest increase in traffic with an increase of 180% over the last year. 

Linkedin too has had a steady climb with more and more Indians visiting the professional networking website. Perhaps recession has played its part in directing traffic to this website. More and more people are creating a Linkedin account many of whom are still to leave college.

Gaurav says that he doesn't take these stats too seriously since it fails to recognise the traffic that comes from Internet kiosks and PDA, and rightly so. A huge amount of internet users in India don't own a computer and use it from internet cafes, so I suppose the are a lot more numbers that have to be added to this report which may present a different picture altogether.

Extra Innings at WAT

For the last 2 years I have been actively leading a virtual life, spending a lot of my time online, trivia crunching. A lot of the info has been feaces, but in between I also managed to gain insight into a few things here and there. I have taken a particular liking to Social Media and the Web and wanted to reach out to a larger audience and that is where WATBlog comes.

I shall be blogging about Social Media, Technology and the Internet over here. Do check it out if you're into that sorta stuff.  And visit this link to see all my posts at WAT

If not, well, Whatever Things will aways be basecamp. You can chill here. 

Showing the love

Please light a candle to show your support for the innocent and brave souls who gave their life away. Or if you happen to possess a weblog or two, please change its template to something white. Or perhaps, wear a white shirt for an hour to show that you care. And in the meantime, sign the petition to stop terrorism as well as an open letter. If we collect a billion signatures, we will show to the terrorists that they have not harmed us. Divided we fall; true, but we are anything but divided. We want to show to the terrorists through our peace marches and our open letters that they have wasted their effort in attacking us.

So what if they continue to attack one part after another.

Let us tweet about it, showing how frustrated we are, let us have the marches and maybe even an anti terrorism beerfest (after all isn't it about staying united and the media attention here? Promoting the fact that we're united even during terror strikes repeadtedly).

Aditya puts it rather succintly here on Patrix's blog

All that these people want is to get a sense of satisfaction about having done something post-attacks however useless the activity might be.

                                                                                

                                                                                  ***

But then looking back, I ask myself. Don't we all want to feel responsible about it and do something? So what if its a tweet up? The final act of communiating out our thoughts isn't lost is it? So what if we're buying a million candles (and this way also increasing the revenue of the wax industry)?

Look, at the end of the day we all need a reason. Many of us do not know how to contribute to this situation. One reason might be because most of us have never experienced it. Being a Kashmiri, I still don't know about the perils and fear my people have faced. Sure I have heard of it, but have never felt it. 

Last summer I was involved in a startup called YoFa. At that time it's motto was Think, Speak, Do. It was about Youth Activism. However, it never specified how much of each should be done. That was left to the person concerned. Similarly, maybe some people want to show their activism through speaking a lot, hence the tweeting, facebooking, endless blogging, some want to think, and some want to do.  

But then there is a fourth activity which was never mentioned in YoFa but which has a role to play. And that's "follow". There are many amongst us, who will move on (or already have) and who have absolutely no idea about how to contribute. So we Retweet, we share links and quote others and so on. And I don't think this wrong. I remember someone once telling me, "if you don't know what to do, follow the crowd". And barring few situations, it hold true. It certainly holds true in this case.

I guess this is what most of the people who go on these candle marches and wear those white shirts also believe in. But as long as it isn't harming anyone, let each one do his own.

Sure if you WANT to go ahead and urge the politicians and ask them to step down, do that as well. 

P.S: YoFa has now transformed into something cooler. They now send people on 10 day road trips to NGOs and become agents of social change. Check their latest initiative Grassroutes

New Media as an elective at BITS Pilani

Electives form an integral part of the academic structure. I would consider myself lucky to be in an institute like BITS Pilani. The vast number of electives it offers its students is almost intimidating. Besides, for some, who landed in Pilani accidentally because they somehow managed to clear the exam, and absolutely detest all the courses that form the part of their curriculum (since everyone might not get the branch of their choice), electives provide solace and possibly a hike in the CGPA(cumulative grade point average).

According to me, the students have as much of a right to demand an elective (given the constraints of the college of course). What I mean is that the college academic board should take feedback from the students regarding what sort of courses would they be interested in. BITS Pilani has a special set of technical electives under the category Emerging Areas(EA). I would love to see New Media under EA. BITS Pilani has a large number of bloggers. While many do it for the joy of typing out their thoughts for the world to read, there are some who seriously need the internet to survive and feel orphaned without digital media. One could start it off as an Audit Course(one which doesn't affect your CGPA and you either pass it or you don't) and then possiby make it a regular course based on the response. As part of the course students can be taken to blog camps in Delhi on a weekend(unconferences are usually held on a sunday/saturday) or probably invite successful bloggers/social media experts etc.

Obviously it goes without saying that the instructor has to be someone in the middle of all the action. Because of this, getting a teacher to the campus is going to be a big problem. I suggest then to organise classes via skype(what better way to lear new media, than to actually use it for teaching). Obviously this is just me thinking out loud.

It's time we start experimenting.

And echoing Rachit's thoughts, we should have our own blog aggregator.

Why the Western Invasion?

I was going through Indianroomates.in, a website quite similar to its American counterpart Roomates.com which aims to help and connect (mostly) the youth seeking accommodation. One thing that really caught my attention was the picture of Indian youth on the homepage. As bizarre as it may sound, when was the last time you saw a non-NGO Indian website which had Indian faces? At the most it might have the token Indian or Black person to show diversity, but I think it’s quite rare to find only Indian people. In the beginning I felt maybe such a strategy is employed to show that that company is global (or at least aspiring to be global) but now it just seems like everyone is following the crowd. But then what about those companies which are purely based in India and don’t seem to be expanding outside India in the likely future. I say this because couple of the web based start ups that launched from my college and had noting to do with foreign clients had picture of Caucasian women playing with their Caucasian kids. It just doesn’t make sense. Why should a premier IIT-JEE (Not too tough to guess which one now) coaching institute which receives over a crore hits every year need to put a header picture of some American university students on its website? I don’t know where the problem lies. Is it that the companies ask the web designing team to put in those pictures (in case the work is being outsourced) or the company itself feels its needs such a picture. The whole point being that if your pictures don’t gel with your venture, you end up looking really stupid.

By the way it was really disappointing to see that the moment I clicked on a page at Indianroomates, it took me to another page. And this one had phirangs on it, smiling.

Here’s one solution. The issue of portraying yourself as something doesn’t need faces. It can be done through symbols as well. If you’re ashamed of putting in Indian people shaking hands (though I don’t know why that would be the case), then might as well show only the shaking of hands on your webpage rather than show a Chinese and a Kenyan doing so, especially if you’re a start up based in a small town whose main market is the nearby city.

Cross posted on WATBlog and Desicritics

On open letters

Enough open letters written by bloggers are surfacing the internet these days. Letters to celebrities and politicians, letters about decisions been taken, mistakes been made, letters about what could-have-been. Letters from people with strong opinions and who probably even share a concern.

Hawkeye had an interesting article the other day on his blog where he shares his opinion on Open letters.

They Suck.

I have written one (or two) in my blog. I now feel very ashamed about it. Every open letter I read makes me cringe. Open Letters are usually defined as letters read by everyone else except the intended recipient. Mainly because the writer does not have the ‘vakku’/ is not important enough to attract the attention of the intended recipient.

I couldn’t agree more. Having seen enough open letters on the World Wide Web, I can safely assume that the people, to whom the letter is directed, seldom get to read it. These include our esteemed politicians, law makers or any authority. Open letters are more of a vent post than anything else. The satisfaction of typing ones thoughts down in a rather “in-your-face” manner more often than not, is compensation enough and no further effort is made to ensure that the open letter reaches the person it is intended to reach. At best, it receives comments from friends, fellow bloggers, stumblers and random passers who share the concern, and sometimes even generates enough publicity to uplift the blogger to than status of an “activist” but nothing more.

Open letters could also perhaps be an interesting way to generate more publicity for your blog. Apart from that it probably also boosts the writers ego. I mean, obviously, if a letter written by you generates 30 comments, most of which are a positive pat on the back, you would obviously consider your job done, even if the person the letter was directed to was sipping orange juice, completely oblivious to the fact that somewhere in some corner of the world wide web there exists a letter directed to him/her.

An open letter can only work if its the other way around. If a famous person addresses it to a group of people, like Steve Jobs’ letter to Ipod users, or Abdul Kalam’s letter to kids of high schools. For a blogger to get his point across to someone important, either the open letter has to receive a lot of media publicity or maybe he/she has to look for an alternative. Obama Girl anyone? If not that then maybe in the official forums of a company which has responsive moderators who will give a damn about your opinions. Another way might be through letters to editorials of popular dailies (for chances are they’re more popular and read by a larger diverse group than your blog).

Mirrored at Mutiny.in

You can enter anytime you like, but you can never leave

The social networking websites bombarded the internet as we entered the new millennium and have being continuing to do so till date. First it was Orkut which made the public go mad (at least in Swadesh) but that was until the cleaner and sleeker Facebook arrived. Just as how there was a social class created amongst the social networking sites in the US where the educated University going people migrated to Facebook from the ubiquitous Myspace, where every layman had an account.

That was the past.

The future is a nightmare.

Facebook is as cluttered as a college going student’s room. It’s got a list of hazaar applications. It’s just the most irritating thing on the planet. It’s got a widget for everything and I mean everything. I get a million quizzes a day which will compare my performance to the three hundred pals’ of mine and then analyse them. Facebook has been minting a lot of money from these. So once you’re fed up of this you think to yourself that I just want to get out of this mess and so you deactivate your account. But here’s the catch: deactivating your account doesn’t delete your profile, which still exists on Facebook’s servers. Quitting it isn’t as easy as you’d have thought. The manual process makes you sweat more that you’d have at those cricket coaching sessions. As this article rightly says:

Mr. Das — who described his plight by quoting lyrics from the Eagles song “Hotel California” that say, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” — has found himself cast as an unlikely mascot for disgruntled Facebook users. Several of them have found his empty profile and sent him messages, “ranging from Eagles song quotes to those of support,” he said.

I joined Facebook out of sheer peer pressure. Everyday I’d check my inbox and what would greet me were five new messages from my contacts from Orkut asking me to join Facebook. When I finally did, I realised that I had way too many contacts on Orkut, so now I had to accept all those guys all over again and has to confirm how I was connected to them and anticipate their writings on my wall.
I compelled to start-up with a social community meant for people who are sick of all the other communities.

Posted simultaneously at Mutiny.in

My first job

I also blog here now.

(click on it and it'll transport you to my page)


The first thing everyone says about it is that its like the"facebook" for desis. A little bit of research shows that it was started by IIT-D passouts and is a Banglore based start up. Also they received 7 million dollars from Sequoia Capital India, this is the same company that funded Google during its early stages.

Lets see how it goes.

Cyberoam is the latest tamasha at college these days.
The authorities have recently come up with this new method to piss students off. All the sites have been classified under various genres and at any given time only some of those genres are active( and at some time none are active). This resulted in some awkward moments for the institute where they were confronted by students who complained that they couldn't open the college website. Snapshots of the webpage were circulated through the LAN.
The situation right now has "improved". The hidden sarcasm because well, though cyberoam has marginally reduced, the pages take forever to load. Each page needs to be refreshed i( i>15) times. I suppose this is part of some holy programme to impart the virtue of patience amongst students. Though the consequences of this may be the loss of the F5 key in all computers before the end of semester and an induced case of Tourettes Syndrome.

This Week:

All thanks to Krishnan(for informing me about it), I won a 255 bucks Gift voucher from Odyssey( a book store in Hyderabad) for winning a quiz competition organised by the Hyderabad Quiz Club. The guy who partnered me, I don't quite remembered his name has to be the best quizzer in Hyderabad, all his guesses were hitting the bulls eye. JK's team came second( he was the quizmaster for OHT 07). Perfect way to end my stay in Hyderabad.

HP was unleashed and well...all who have read the book will agree with me when I say that well....we all sorta guessed the end didn't we?( barring a few flashbacks comprising the climax) and serious Albus Severus? Won't he be taunted by his little wizard buddies!

Pune seems to be one stop congregation of all urban college going junta. They seriously have an excess of them. They seem to be haunting every nook and cranny, infesting their wretched souls upon every kiosk, every counter, every table. Honestly, if you ever feel the absence of bright tee and dark jeans clad youth(especially feminine), you know where to head too.
Another thing about Pune, it acts like a slow poison with a burning after taste. The moment you land there(airport), you are greeted by lush greenery. Every hue of green is snugly arranged and it makes for a great viewing. A drive though this bio reserve is truly spectacular and then the reality rams up that tiny little orifice in your buttocks! People drive here to kill! The roads are magnificently adorned by extra deposits of tar which gives one an excuse to miss those rides in the amusement park. The not-so-lucky ones' tyres get stuck in the strategically located depressions. The perfect killjoy!
Pune is like the kid that wanted to be cool, but sorta lost his money.
But then there's a bright side to pune as well, they have some real nice eateries. Lovely bakeries that serve delectable savories. The cops are friendly. They are, atleast to a boy whom they catch sandwiched between two attractive women( he isn't aware that they are his cousins and wouldn't believe it either) at midnight, letting him go without any corporal punishment or sexual impairment( and no fine).
By convention every street MUST have an institution either spiritual or educational in nature catering to a medium or small proportion of people( some of which have to be foreigners, also by convention).
They have an amusing conversion system when it comes to autorickshaws, bodmas is extensively applied.
Conclusion:Pune is better than a lot of other places.

While in Pune, I also got to watch DIE HARD 4.0

The movie has to be the dumbest action flick I have seen. Okay Okay, I know that might have been like a massive slap across the moobs of you macho men but I can' help it. But hey, I never said it was a bad movie. It was very good, good in the sense that at any point of time, some one could walk into the hall and start watching the movie and yet not feel as though he's missed anything substantial. Computer genius not getting due credit for his mastermind project decides that its payback time and tries to bring the nation to a halt and cause a firesale. Wow! That's uber original!
Bruce Willis has done a commendable job in beating the cyber criminals( a chinki assasin included) to pulp, without even hurting his fists.I still feel the movie has been given tooo much hype, I'd watch Con-Air anyday.

And now in Delhi. its 2.34 AM and the people I want, aren't online. Might not update for a few days, or maybe the next post directly from Pilani.

Cya all there!

Shock!

So when was the last time you were in a situation that actually motivated you to call yourself a “chutiya”? (Roughly translated to dickhead)

The other day I was trotting about the house in my usual tumultuous ways, as is common to bored blokes with a lot of sugar clotting their blood, when my eyes fell upon a piece of paper. It was neatly folded, characteristic of an official letter, more so of the most dreaded of them all. Bill.

It had BSNL etched on it and from the moment I laid my eyes upon in, my heart started to beat faster. And the blood circulation cut short (if you get my drift). I inched closer, slowly, thus creating a pseudo slow-motion moment with my arms extended and longing to tear that seal and get over with it.

Oh, I was no fool (or fu as my brothers from the ghetto would like calling it). I knew very well that the bill was going to be quite a handsome sum, which would make its way to the hardworking people in the PSU: BSNL. I gulped couple of imaginary snot balls down my throat before unleashing the demon upon me.

And then I did it. I was enlightened.

It wasn’t a demon.

IT WAS SATAN HIMSELF.

From then onwards I was convinced that the number of the beast wasn’t 666 and was indeed the number that I had my eyes transfixed on: 9850.60 (The devil deserves accuracy up to two decimal places as well). 9850.60, approximately 10K bucks! How does one get that? How is that even possible? Seriously, it makes for excellent conversation material. I mean who wouldn’t take notice of a guy who blew up 10K on his phone bill.

Surely there had to be a miscalculation. Surely! It just seemed like such a travesty considering that we’re a struggling third world nation (errm…lets suppose we are, it’s my blog, ergo, I get to make the assumptions). Where was the god-damn concession? As I were to realize after heavy scrutinizing of the bill on numerous occasions and from various angles, the kind folks at BSNL did cut down on a lot of money before kindly passing on the bill to our household.

The real blow was to come once I saw the break-up stats. It wasn’t the phone bill exactly that sky-rocketed the bill. The phone bill didn’t even cause a collateral damage (It was responsible for about one tenth of the entire bill). It was the Internet. The underdogs, the whore, the vamp, give it whatever name you want to. I felt mugged and raped if not both. 7000 bucks! Who does that? That’s ludicrous! Can you keep a straight face while publicly telling people that you spent seven grand on internet without breaking into a guffaw(even more so lest you end up farting simultaneously). How does one achieve that? Then the memories exploded. 150 videos on Youtube, constant Orkutting, endless Wiki-ing, tireless browsing, updates, blogs, more blogs. Science, Business, Tech, Movies, Filth Diaries, more business. Never log out of the Gtalk, so much so that people started to doubt whether I had exchanged my real identity for a virtual one and was leading a life on the web. BSNL had given me 2500 free MB of upload/download limit, plus free usage during 2-8 AM( which they called Happy Hours, clichéd yet true), which came to around 3000 MB. Despite all these goodies I used another 8K MB (obviously during the day) which cost me around 7K dosh, thus accounting for a lion’s share of the humongous amount.

I had trouble meeting my father’s eye that night. I thought I’d get a lecture from the folks about how I’ve lost the focus in life and they might even speculate "moaning Danish pornstars" to be somehow involved in this affair. They might go on about how when they were my age there was no such distraction to occupy their time and hence they are where they are today and I am 90 Kilos. Instead, Dad was quite bemused to see his son stare at his toes with ardent interest as though it was the most interesting thing in the vicinity. Clearly he hadn’t seen the bill. But that day would come too…and pretty soon.