You are dumb when ... ... someone says on the other line "Hello" as to mean "Hello there" and you ask them - "Can you hear me?" You are in the 21st century when: you work on a project for an associate of your employer the people who your first contacts at the client themselves are employees of a third party on a contract with your client your project associate is currently in transition to another city s/he works with a manager who is based out of a third city your primary liaison a the client is serving his/her notice period however people whom you interact with at the client happen to be from your own country, your own city and speak the same language as you ... .... that's Globalization for you !! :-)

Well ... getting bored of eating the same stuff, I tried out cooking rice kheer the other day. Here are some snaps. I first looked up the recipe here , and then cooked plain rice and set the milk for heating ... The next stage was to mix them up, add sugar and starts stirring ... And here's how the final preparation looks like ... Delicious ....

In 2004, on the same day as today, I made my first post on this blog, and I have loved every bit of it. Blogs are the individual's 'press releases' to the world - they are chronicles of what people do, think and feel about their lives - and by doing all this, blogs epitomize the much elusive state that mankind has been in quest of, since time immemorial - FREEDOM! And when it comes to freedom, lets hear from the perspective of freedom's champion - Mahatma Gandhi. I quote Louis Ficher: Gandhi believed in revealing himself. He regarded secrecy as the enemy of freedom-not only the freedom of India but the freedom of man. He exposed even the innermost personal thoughts which individuals usually regard as private. Guess Gandhi would have loved to have a blog :-) [I have quoted Gandhi on individualism earlier as well]. How correct Gandhi was becomes clear when you read today's authors talking about the importance of individuals in the present society. For example, Thom...

Went around the city, its castle and cathedral today - check out the photos ...

Well actually nothing special - but it was the first time I made it all on my own: sandwiches. Got up lazily at 9 - and made tea - while having tea - cut some onion and tomatoes. Had put potatoes in the microwave. Once they were cooked I cut them too. Then, I mixed and mashed the whole thing, added salt and some biryani masala (since I did not have garam masala) and smeared some butter on it. This I microwaved for a minute and then mixed it to get the butter mix up. Reheated it for few more minutes. Toasted a few slices of bread - put the mixture above between them - and done! Anyone having any tips to further spice this up?

Well ... not exactly the Vegas look - but this was a picture I took just next to the New Delhi railway station. .

I am at Norwich now at my Studio apartment - nice cosy place. It has a couch like the one Joey and Chandler have in F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and I am spending most of my time at home watching Friends on TV, eating and surfing the net!! Proper Couch Potato Eh!! Yeah ... So presented below are some photos of my lunch today (Baked Beans with Onion sprinkled on a bread; the bread is smeared with butter) - tastes amazing - believe you me! And the next photo below that is the Sofas on which I spend most of time sitting and surfing! .

You might be surprised to see the title after the post I made last night. But I am really impressed the way Zapak has reacted to my post. Read on to know more ... When I made the post last night, India was still in deep slumber; and when India woke up - I was in deep slumber. But while I was asleep, the Zapak team woke up to my blog post - they thereafter tracked me through various Social networks and by the time I woke up, I had a couple requests from their team to connect to me. [The earliest one was as early as 7.57 AM India time] I was surprised (and impressed) about the speed with which they contacted me - so I sent out my contact details, and Lo! Within less than an hour I had them calling me explaining that the mail I received was because of some kind of spurious network activity and was a "security issue" which they were dealing with. They requested me to remove the image which I had put up on my blog, because it revealed some internal statistics they were tracking. W...

Update : If you are reading this - please also read my follow up post Zapak - a dynamic and proactive Web2.0 company? which is an account of the events which happened after I made this post. Someone at Zapak.com (also ZapakMail) seems to have conjured up the "good idea" of sending out Birthday emails to its members. But as they say - the implementation and not the idea is what creates success - apart from the fact that the email looks like a 1990 word document [and that too hardly like a greeting or newsletter of 1990 but rather looking like some office document] - the email commits the one of the worst faux passes of the internet world. [The Image has been removed] The email [below the part shown above] contains a list of all email ID's who have registered their birthdates for the day! Not only is everyone's email ID being revealed to everyone else, their birthdates are also revealed. For so many people who keep variations of their birthdates as their passwords - ...

I am at one of my 'old' offices today - as I went to the cafeteria to collect my lunch, I was pleasantly surprised to see the addition of a new counter to the lunch area - Tiffin Bites: Indian curry food. The counter was serving Chhole, some paneer curry and roti & rice along with Indian pickles. Since I am on a brief trip, I decided to rather enjoy the typical British food items which I don't get back home in India - jacket potato & beans, croissants, Delis, Salads (with lots of Mayonnaise on it). But after a moment I realized that not just me, no Indian face (you can find quite a few in London at any place) was found at the Tiffin bites food counter. All of its customers were non-Indian. I'm sure, if it continues like this for another 5 years, the British will find Indian foods in their regular lunch and dinner, ahead of their own traditionals. (It would actually be a bad news for someone like me who would rather enjoy British food in Britain). I have also ob...

Sourced from: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs . But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants . Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure. It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement, and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read. Therefore, study the graphics used by editors and imitate them. Study the graphi...

As some of you know, I am in London for a little over a month. Landed here on Saturday (10/05) evening. Strangely enough, as the flight flew over the city, across the Thames, the Tower bridge and the Buckingham Palace - I got a feeling of homecoming ! I felt somehow that this was also one of "my" cities; though I have stayed in London only for 6 months, it definitely felt like home. The same evening, went to Leicester square and barged into Wagamama's - one of my favourite eating places in London and had saien soba . It was great to be in Leicester Square on a Saturday night among the usual crowd and frenzy. Came back by a bus which took me through all the familiar places from Blackfrairs (where my previous office was) to Trafalgar Square, St. Paul's Cathedral .... felt quite nostalgic remembering the times I spent looking around these places for the first time - 'twas then with some NITIE friends who also were in London :-). Sunday was mostly lazy, had fo...

A constant debate in India is between public and private sectors - which is better for growth, which is better for social equity and which can propel the nation to the next orbit? Clearly, given the last decade and half's run that the economy has had, private sector has won the debate as far as Industry is concerned. However the debate still continues for public utility services like education and healthcare. Especially with such a large part of the population still to become literate and quality of education being under doubt (even for the private sector in some cases), the pendulum is still oscillating between private and public for the educational sector. While there are several arguments in favour of privatization of education and private education vouchers , the one's against it are not completely unfounded. I quote: The assumption of competition in turn assumes three things: a) that “school choice” is real, b) that it is not possible to cheat the system, and c) that in...

MBA's usually learn about Theory X:Theory Y methods of management. Over the last 3 years in corporate world I have seen similar two opposite styles of business development at work - I christen them "Theory A: Theory B" style of business. Theory A A manager who believes that new business is the best business and getting business is his most important priority. Such managers tend to paint a very rosy picture of their company / team / work in front of a new client. They also tend to over-commit. Though not as a rule, but as a corollary, such managers tend to pay very little attention to work (projects / deliverables etc) when its comes to delivery / execution. Thus they tend to over-commit and under perform, resulting in low repeat business. However, their future pipelines are usually so full of work that they are hardly ever bothered or worried by the lack of repeat business. Theory B A manager who believes that repeat business is the best form of business and hence his fo...