TEDTalks: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on Africa

Credit: TED.com

I remember this stupid joke that one of my friends forwarded me; which was a typical stereotype that I came across often:

You think EVERY South Indian comes from ‘ Madras ‘ and is Madrasi

And it’s fine while it’s a joke. The problem arises when it truly truly represents our world view of the many different aspects coagulating as a single entity. For so many, (and including me initially !) , Africa was a homologous continent, as one type of people with the same problems of corruption, poverty, starvation and dictatorship. Hence, a blood diamond war in Sierra Leone meant Africa was messed up, wild-fire inflation in Zimbabwe meant problematic economies and the Rwandan genocide…well, murderous dictators traversed the entire continent. It was the neighborhood effect which was mentioned in Ngozi’s speech: If something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected.

But this speech from Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala rips out this homologous facade of poverty, strife and misery and replaces it one of prosperity and progress in Nigeria. Ms. Ngozi was the first woman Finance Minister of Nigeria and also a director of the World Bank. I think it was the first speech below that made me realize how fast that country was progressing. From 4, 500 landlines in a 30-year period to 32 million GSM lines by 2007? (Hey! I’m a telecoms guy! It’s my index of progress and growth!). MTN made $360 million profit per year for atleast three years post liberalization? Nigeria was second fastest growing telephone subscriber base after  China in 2007? Who knew? You see this speech and you realize how badly those countries have been underestimated in terms of progress….it’s a brilliant speech by an extremely strong, charismatic, beautiful and courageous woman ! Fabulous ! It’s the first speech after which I started reading and learning more about telecoms business in Africa. The way mobile money has spread across various countries of the continent and the way they have utilized the basic telephony technologies to build so many various services and products makes me believe that Africa can really be the trend-setter in  a very different type of commerce based on telephony.

Favorite speech:

Other speeches on TED.com:

 

TED profile: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Leh li !!!

Well, finally the Leh trip is complete ! And what a trip it was. I’m not gonna get into a day by day re-telling of the story but just how my perceptions about myself and the world around me kept changing:

1. The definition of national highways is so varied that there should be a taxonomy of national highways: based on material (concrete, brick, mud, stones, ), size (8-lane, 6-lane, 0.5 – lane, what lane?), or even type (expressways, the twisty types, ghatis-steep and ghati-mild)
2. Random structures create beautiful if not violent landscapes
3. All there was me, the bike, the roads and my thoughts. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
4. Comfort is overrated.
5. The sun is one of the most dramatic lighting equipment known to man. The tricks it plays around other natural bodies is just phenomenal.
6. Sometimes, discovery is more important than invention
7. Some places in India are more different than other parts of the country and more similar to other countries bordering us ! How can one state have three major regions dominated by three different religions living atleast peacefully with each other is beyond me
8. Highways are more beautiful than expressways. Sometimes, beauty is more important than efficiency.
9. Religion – just another sham where people are exploited for their faith
10. Army personnel – truly officers and gentlemen. Sometimes, they just face a losing battle like that in Kashmir but they are always grace under fire.
11. Sometimes all you have to do is just ask – for a bargain or a discount or a favor. People in general are amazingly helpful.
12. Some clashes cannot be resolved. All you can do is contain its impact. All you can do is hope that people’s livelihoods are not destroyed.
13. Depending on our current media alone for news is harmful to your understanding of the world we live in. Significant exception – BBC World
14. A trip like this is what separates the real world from the one that we experience cooped up behind the desk
15. The contrast between a still object on the banks of a fast moving object is ironic
16. Most round stones are found around the rivers. This is because they are shaped by the relentless hammering of the water on these rocks.
17. You learn so much more when you’re getting screwed!!
18. People live in such different situations and such difficult times today. Lorry drivers stuck without food for days, people forced to migrate to other cities, earning most of their living in 5 months of the year
19. People are fascinatingly crazy. Cyclists who did what they do best from Leh to Manali !! Kids who run up to the middle of the highway to get a high-five from us. Bikers saluting each other when they pass.
20. When you are part of a minority, it is so much easier to bond together especially because it’s so easy to talk about shared experiences.
21. Sometimes, the vocabulary is more important than the statement. When people use the words “Azaad Kashmir”, you know where the hearts are.
22. Learning how business operates whether it’s the hotels or tourist operators or shikaaras on the Dhal Lake or Mega Cabs is endlessly fascinating from the point of view of a person within that business
23. The difference between consultants and entrepreneurs is the ability to improvise on the spot – Vivek Narasimhan
24. Never ever ever give up
25. There always will be problems, disasters and irritation. That’s the only reason we feel the high after overcoming them
26. If I knew how painful some parts of the trip would be, I’m not sure I would be as enthusiastic as starting the trip as I was
27. People will ALWAYS rise to the occasion when they are the only people who can do something about the problem.
28. When you want something really bad, the whole universe conspires to help you achieve it.
29. Sometimes, you need pumice to scrub off painfully, all that is not important and all that is not you. This trip was my pumice
30. It’s OK sometimes to temporarily back down from a problem as long as you do intend to overcome it soon.
31. If you can’t go through it, go over it, under it or around it but do overcome it
32. Despite our best intentions, we do cry over spilt milk often.
33. Memories are captured so much more beautifully by the eye than by the camera lens.
34. Adverse situations make the most memorable war stories. We all need them
35. What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger
36. Petrol dissolves paint! Especially when you wouldn’t want it to

Gas flares

Well ! I know I haven’t really written about the trip to the Taj as a tourist-y thing. I think that post is probably dead in the water. Anyways, there was one cool thing that I saw on the way back. A gas flare ! Typically, a gas flare basically is used to burn harmful methane or act as safety valves in refineries. So usually, what you see is this:

However, the gas flare we were looking at was kinda sporadic as in the fire came out in bursts. Against a pitch dark sky with no stars and best of all, no headlights or street lamps, the sporadic bursts looked like Ballu called ” an meteor hitting the chimney stack. Or some kind of wild, strobelight like beautiful, pulsating dance of fire.

Yes,I know that gas flares are harmful to the atmosphere and are one of the main causes of global warming. But this one was beautiful

Free food…

…with a catch ! You have to reach there first ! Alps, wanna do a foodie review here ? Lemme know ! Would love to join in

Anyways, apparently there are other ways to get there as well . One of the holy/ spiritual mountains at X’ian. Damn it ! I didn’t know about this one when I went there ! Just the excavations of the terracota soldiers !

All photos and reference from Core77

When the food’s plane bad !

Optional title: When the food is as bad as my puns.

The irony is that despite my non-stop travel I just hate flights. The cabin pressure is always maintained exactly at a level where my sinuses burst open to floods of snot, my ears pop like popcorn in a fucking microwave and when, all I want to do is curl up, praying that sleep envelops your body and mind before….TOO LATE !! The serving carts bump into the seats. You still close your eyes hoping to fall asleep before nopes, late again. “Sir (or Mr. Kannan, as they have started doing what social media experts would call customizing the experience) would you prefer veg or non-veg?”. In other words, “Cyanide or sulphuric acid, bitch?. You mumble off some statement about wanting to live so you refuse the “goodies” but woe is beside you. Actually, it’s a dickhead sitting in the window seat who will not give up the free meal and goes “Veg, please”.

And then the torture starts. The demonic sound of crinkling of the foil followed by the rush of fumes from food prepared in the stone age and pre-heated in the iron age that waft through your nostrils. You want to gag and vomit but aha! You knew this shit would happen. That’s why you caught the flight on an empty stomach. I know. I could have been describing an execution of a prisoner in the gas chamber because that’s exactly how you feel. Except the prisoner lasts 15 minutes. These fumes last the entire fucking journey. And given my sensitive olfactory organs, I realize that even though the food looks different across different flights, it smells the fucking same !! Same !! It’s like they have a scent they add to the food called “Eau de come fuck my nostrils”. It’s easy to fall for the trap of thinking that they feed the same shit to all passengers day after day except that one day the color of the rice is moldy green while the other it is the color of rice that passes that has been dragged through the Thar desert. Oh and the veggies. There are only two times I’ve spat out potato, once at my college mess and the other, every time I have tried eating on a flight.

Well, we go on to the beverages. Coffee and tea. Or so they call it. When a caffeine-fiend like me tries it once and refuses to partake in such offensive fluids again, the experience is self-explanatory. I mean seriously, I can’t believe some coffee plant died for this crap. It was probably extracted from the digested coffee beans from the arse of a dead dog. It’s like they ran out of  the dicoction and replaced it with I don’t know..phenyl? I guess the reason people don’t die from such food and liquids is that the coffee probably reacts with the food to create some kind of neutral shit that comes out of their ass without harming the body (noticeably) and then promptly recycled. Atleast the beverages don’t release any noxious fumes (that tingle and then destroy every smell-sensitive pore of my nostrils).

At one time, the full-service flights differentiated themselves from the budget flights predominantly because they offered free food. Once, I realized that I switched to budget airlines with a vengeance. SpiceJet, Indigo, GoAir….I love you all! Thanks for the exorbitant peanuts and the sandwiches ! Oh and the juices !

Inspired by this open letter to Richard Branson:

Virgin: the world’s best passenger complaint letter?

Wah Taj – Part II

Credit: Sarav K

Well, the brain is buzzing post my trip yesterday to the Taj Mahal at Agra. While there was obviously the typical tourist-y sense of awe seeing it, it didn’t take long for the cynical side of me (or my better half as I call it) to re-frame the construction of the Taj in today’s standards.

Can you imagine the construction of the Taj as a project set up by a company, financed by banks and whose process was reviewed by the auditors?

1.Project: Build mausoleum for dead wife

2. Expected cost: Rs. 32 million

3. Expected cash-flow / revenue: No

4. Expected ROI ? No

5. Financing – Taxes earned from people; free labor from peasants

6. Expected timeline for completion: 22 years

7. Raw materials: White marble was brought from Rajasthan, jasper from Punjab, jade and crystal from China, turquoise from Tibet, the Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, sapphire came from Sri Lanka and the carnelian from Arabia

8. Mode of transportation: 1,000 elephants

9. Labor: 20,000 people

10. Retention strategy: Not only is the labor not to be retained but their hands are to be cut off (This may be a rumor but I do remember something like this did happen).

Would you approve of this project today ? No! Why? Cos’ the risks are too high. There is no source of revenue, positive cash flow, no ROI, huge cost over-runs and project delays ! There is not one single element of this that project that makes business sense!

What I’m trying to say is that not all endeavors should be measured against such parameters. Not to say that if these parameters are irrelevant but that if we keep “optimizing our processes” or “cutting the fat” or “closing the process gaps” or “enhancing the efficiency”, we   might never have got a Taj Mahal. Is it just co-incidence that the 7 wonders of the modern world don’t hold a light to the original 7 wonders of the world? Obviously, one simple reason is that democracies have replaced monarchies and empires so that makes everyone accountable. But are too  busy worrying about the risks and controls and the ROI (again, not to stress that these are not important) that we keep applying this to everything that we do?

Wah Taj ! Part 1

Despite Z’s relentless pushing me to go , the plans finally once again got re-confirmed 5 minutes after this post. Anyways, another road-trip (after a really loooong time) was irresistible. Went over to RJ’s place on Saturday evening, got sloshed till 3 am and left for Agra at 8:30 am. Anyways, I’ll probably write about the actual trip in another post. I just wanted to pen down two thoughts on the actual monument. The first one in this post:

1. You know how stories start with something unremarkable but you still read the book anyways cos’ you KNOW there is going to be a BANG! time. The moment that keeps your fingers glued to the pages or your eyes fixated on the screen. That whatever you’ve seen so far has been made for this moment. This post is about a similar build-up. It just seemed that that was exactly how the Taj is kind of unveiled to you. It starts with standard red sandstone gateway inlaid with marble patterns and inscriptions. Looks like your standard historic monument

The gatehouse itself is around 46 meters in depth and is completely dark. And the exit (into the gardens surrounding the Taj) is in the shape of the the typical Mughal entrance. From this point of view, you can partially see the sparkling white marble of the Taj Mahal (atleast from afar) surrounded by the azure sky.

Go further down the gateway, and the doorway then frames the Taj beautifully. I guess the entrance was so designed that it would frame it symmetrically. The contrast of the darkness of the gateway (the nearest to you) against the bright whiteness and the blue of the sky (farther away) creates this awesome effect and is what takes your breath away of this first glimpse of the complete Taj.

And then, you spill over into the enclosure of the Taj and this stark contrast then gives way to a riot of colors of green gardens, the sky and the Taj reflected in the pool (al Kawthar) and the work of the doorway as a frame of the Taj is replaced by the entire sky itself. Sounds a little poetic, but I am not sure how better to describe it.

So it’s not just the sheer beauty of the Taj but how the whole think is unveiled to the person: bit by bit. I call it the stripper theory: (Am consultant => will have my own theory): The business of a stripper is not just based on how she looks topless but more about the entire undressing process. THAT’s what keeps us guys hooked on. If she came onto the stage topless, the excitement would be much less. When she comes in dressed as a slutty nurse, a policewoman or even Catwoman. It’s not about seeing a naked woman. It’s about the fantasy.

It’s what happens when Steve Jobs says: “Oh and one more thing!” before he reveals an iPod (from his pocket) or an iPhone or a Mac Air (from an airmail envelope to show how thin it was). It’s about how the product/service/ experience is unveiled to the user. Whether it’s the booting process of an OS, or the setup process of a software product or even the unpacking of a Mac product. I’m not an GUI expert or anything. But man, this was some eye-opener

Photo below is just to emphasize the contrast between the red sandstone of the gateway vs. the white marble of the Taj that you finally see.

Rest of the photos are on the Flickr page here

The more you plan your trips, meet-ups and travels….

…they nearer to the deadline they get cancelled.

Emirates’ Wake Me up labels

Interesting post by Rajesh Setty on Emirates’ Wake Me Up labels: Basically, it just helps the attendant to know that if you doze off, what would she need to wake you up for? Food, duty-free stuff or just let you be.

I have the exact opposite problem of Rajesh. I hate flight meals. Seriously! For a crazy flier like me, that’s kinda wierd. But the smell of pre-heated biryani and gravy in that pressurized steel case makes me nauseous. That’s why I prefer to fly the budget airlines sans meals. But even when I get on to Jet or Kingfisher, I try my best to catch up with my sleep. Hoping that I don’t wake up to the smell of food when it’s served. So I HATE it when the stewardess wakes me up for meals (I have insomnia and find it difficult to go back to sleep once awake!). This would be a really cool solution. Just paste “Just leave the fuck alone” sticker on the seat / headrest – also called the “do not disturb” sticker and doze off.

Dilli ki sardi

Credit: Pranav Singh

Usually, I don’t have much good to say about Delhi. The roads are big but so are people’s egos. The only people from Delhi I like are the people I know. But when you meet strangers, the only thing that hits you in your face is their obnoxious attitude. However, for the past two years, I’ve been spending the winters in Delhi and I have to admit, I LOVE IT. I wish Bombay had those kind of winters. The incredibly cold, dry wind rushing against your body is one of my favorite feelings. In college, I was made fun of because I loved sticking my head out of the college bus window like a dog cause I loved the feeling of the wind on my face. And 8 degrees in Delhi or 42 degrees in Chennai, I love that feeling. And the fog! Oh man, I can’t believe I’m saying this but I love that too. I got a chance to drive an SX4 through it and man, what an exhilarating experience ! I won’t say my driving was much appreciated by either A or B – owners of the precious SX4 but wow! Awesome! I mean just imagine, that you can’t see the chowk bang in the middle of the road about 10 ft away. All you can see is the blinker lights of the car ahead suddenly moving to the left and then again to the right and then you go – “Oh yeah! Now I see it!” It was so thick then that I knew I was near my guest house but couldn’t see beyond the pavements across the road ! So had to get off and hoof it there ! Scary but Whattay!!!! There were times when we got off work at 8 p.m. and had to go back cos’ the fog was getting too thick (We had to get back and work at the guesthouse ). Work till around 1 a.m. and then head down to the 24-hour cafe nearby for some awesome hot espresso and maybe some grub. Felt like heaven even without a Raymond’s suit. I mean, I remember me and my colleague went out at around 10 pm for some soul-searching….(actually, it was spirit-searching, the one you find in a Signature bottle) and all we could see was a wall of white! Somewhere in the distance, we finally saw some lights and some vague shadows of people. First law: People+lights+fog+10pm+Friday night = Theka ! And we were right ! But we took 20 minutes for the walk back cos’ we had to keep straining our eyes to find the silhouette of the guest house. And well, nothing and I mean nothing beats the hot tea, the Maggi noodles or the occasional sutta (I really mean occasional) at 11 am when we took a break from some seriously brain-numbing work !!

I even remember at one time, I could see the sun directly at 12 noon through the fog without even squinting my eyes. And let me tell you, an orange sun at 12 noon through a white blanket of air (Really!) was simply amazing !!