Thought Garage

How long will it take to multiply these two numbers ? 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 It just took 28 seconds for Shakuntala Devi and earned her a record in the Guinness Book Of Records.  A child prodigy with unbelievable power to calculate will remain an inspiration to so many.  She died earlier this year. Google’s doodle today honors Shakuntala Devi , known to the world as the ‘Human Computer’, on her 84th birthday. RIP.

Many people say we can not change the world until we change the people. But you can see, how a change in the environment around changes the people around. Talk about raising expectations of good behavior by setting up the environment that encourages it. Want to do a SpotFix? Watch these first-timers! Team Asha is a random group of people who asked The Ugly Indian to arrange a SpotFix. Many other such random groups have come forward. For more details, visit www.theuglyindian.com or go the The Ugly Indian on FaceBook. If you want to do a Spotfix in Bangalore, write to theuglyindian@gmail.com

This is a T-shirt I bought almost 10 years ago that depicts the Lord Ganesha as India’s super computer. It was so much fun wearing it then as it used to grab everybody’s attention. And in my recent trip, I recovered it and wore again yesterday. It grabbed everybody’s attention as usual. Look at the mighty RAM he got. 256MB RAM.  Well it was quite a bit of RAM 10 years back. Thanks to Harish for taking a quick snap and sharing it. The iPhone he used got lot more power and memory than one the best computers of that time. That says it all. I guess, I should pull out all my T’s with messages and post it. May be myself and those around me that time could relive some of those wonderful moments.

There was so much pressure on Indian IT Services firms for a long time to enter product space and they refused and insisted that Services is the key. After all, their strength and  innovation is in creating market driven and efficient service delivery models.  They not only succeeded with flying colors in delivering services, they influenced the entire world to turn to services. So in more than one way, there were right on about services.  Some key milestones that indicate the strong inclination towards services just the way Indian IT Services headed all along: IBM once synonymous with PC sells its iconic PC Business and rebrand itself as IT services (or emphatically Smart Solutions for the planet) HP buys EDS and says it is critical to enter Services business as profits drop in all other directions. Dell buys Perot Systems, seen as following HP. Xerox , the iconic innovator buys Affiliated Computer Services, citing exactly the same reason of survi...

The days of 'Free' Customer service looks to be over. At least a quality customer service is. This comes to me (and I am sure for most of you) as a big surprise, but I guess we all have to get used to this. Occasionally, "we've heard from customers that it's hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they were getting," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman. So, Dell introduced a Support Service called as 'Your Tech Team' Service, that promises that Technical Experts are from North America (instead of Bangalore, India for instance) and average wait time would be less than 2 minutes. Sounds Great, finally Dell heard the Customers. Not quite. This service is not for every Dell customer that purchases a Dell product, but only for those who pay an additional $12.95 a month to receive this 'premium' service. And Dell Spokesman put a PR spin to this 'Pay if You need Good Customer Support' se...

I asked this question to many of my friends and colleagues in Bangalore, their answer was unanimous. A big NO. They are already spending about 3 hours in their commute already and 67% of children in Bangalore are suffering from Asthma and respiratory illnesses, thanks to pollution cover added by alarming increase in automobiles on the narrow roads. When they think about the Rs.1 Lakh car Nano, they could only think of how worse the pollution could get and how their commute time will just double. I wasn't sure that even the automobile industry is so heavily subsidized. Here is an excellent analysis of what Nano means to Indian economy and its crippling infrastructure. Last fortnight, when the world’s richest Indian Lakshmi Mittal visited Kolkata, the city of his youth, he was thrilled to see change. Mittal told the media that the biggest difference he saw was the many flyovers dotting the city skyline and “disciplined traffic”. This is great progress, he told jou...