I haven't updated much about my personal life during the past 6 months ... probably the most 'unusual' 6 months of my life. I met Divya exactly 6 months ago on July 12th (this was at the Oberoi Mall, Goregaon), and probably the first time I drove her back to her office in KulupwadiBorivali (also the locality where she stays .. till now). Sidethought: I am feeling spooky about my life again! My courtship is ending in an exact 6 months (a limit I secretly desired for my courtship period). I got engaged on 15th August and am getting married on 25th December. Something is really spooky ... why does my life have so many 'perfect' endings? Since then there have been numerous trips to Borivali - in fact averaging 2 per week - one each on Saturdays and Sundays. Today, as I was driving back on the Western Express, I suddenly felt nostalgic realizing the fact that today was the last time I dropped Divya off to 'her' home in Borivali; the last time I was driving back ...

A presentation I gave at a 'mock training session' during an adult learning workshop organized at KPMG. Do Contact me if you need more inputs than this presentation. And Btw ... as many would know, I am getting married on this Christmas - the wedding invite is at the website www.divnik.in (which is the screenshot that you see below on the title slide)! Do visit ... and comments invited. How To Design A Website View more presentations from Nikhil Kulkarni .

There are some actors who are attractive, some who can act well and one in a billion that are StRoKe of lightening. Shah Rukh is a stroke. Even the word stroke has his initials. http://bit.ly/7mg4Xo Some quotes from Retd. Col. R K Kapoor's interview (maker of Fauji) : (During Audition for Fauji) I asked them to fight me like an enemy. I punched a couple of them really hard. But Shah Rukh, in his turn, gave me the punch of my life. He hit me so hard that I saw stars in the daylight. Then, I knew he had something in him apart from a charismatic face. I had found my Abhimanyu Rai. What has worked for Shah Rukh is that he is universal. He is not an angry young man. Neither is he a `sanyasi' or a lover boy. He is all of them and still none of them. Other SRK related posts: Chak De Review , OSO review

Continued From: Why doesn’t Indian startup ecosystem churn out product companies? Let me start by picking up a few ideas from Paul Graham . Not Buildings If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings. But it's the people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings. I read occasionally about attempts to set up "technology parks" in other places, as if the active ingredient of Silicon Valley were the office space. Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a silicon valley, because the key stage in the life of a startup happens before they want that kind of space. The key stage is when they're three guys operating out of an apartment. So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a company . And to reproduce that you need those people. Universities The exciting thing is, [if] all you need are the people, If you could ...

Look at most successful Indian startups or look at a broader area of ventures (including initiatives by large businesses) in general; Tech or non-tech - what is clearly evident is the abundance of success stories in the services sector and an equivalent dearth of product based businesses . In fact, if I were to think up successful product venture from India - only 2 names come to my mind: PureIt from HUL in the consumer products space and Slideshare in the web space. (I am counting out Zoho here because the company is based out of the US and use India only as a ODC - essentially turning India operations as mere services arm.) A quick Google Search on the subject will reveal few reasons for this; for example: Lack of deep pockets of Indian VC's to fund serious research and hence Indian entrepreneurs can’t afford to take big bets Failures are not welcome in India Lack of 'optimism' in the Indian consumer - hence very sluggish adoption of new 'products' Aping the w...

Recently Sam Pitroda recently mentioned that - "too much focus on engineering and medical education has created a situation in India where liberal arts really did not get the kind of attention it deserved." He said: "A good liberal arts education is important to produce leaders. India has now begun to recognizse that we need not only world class engineering education, we also need world-class liberal arts education. And, we agree that the model we have in (University of) Chicago or Harvard is a model that we need to look at , but it needs to be Indianised - it has to be of a local context." Clearly, Pitroda is talking about the skewed model of having competitive exams for professional courses only which has created a void in liberal arts education in India. Unlike US system, Indian universities do not have a uniform SAT for admission across disciplines – so while for entry to professional courses like engineering and medicine we rely on AIEEE/SEEE and PMT/CPMT’s bu...

"It was his child - the bank, how could he let it die?" - these were the thoughts which reverberated in Gopaldas's mind on that cold winter morning as he sipped his morning tea before readying himself for office .... for the last time, he thought. But had it not been for him, the Bank would have been sold out long ago. Samaj Uday Cooperative Bank was an ailing bank and so small in its operations that apart from its own depositors and borrowers, hardly anyone knew about the Bank. Started in the early years of Indian independence by a group of small traders along Gandhian principles - the Bank's main aim was to provide credit to small traders and businessmen. Gopaldas had joined the Bank in September 1962, the month he remembered so precisely because it was the month India went to war with China. He had joined as a junior clerk but his diligence in the early years saw him rise fast and become an officer by the time he got married. By 1984 he was among the senior managem...

Having been personally associated with an attempt to create a 'personalized' news reader, it was amusing to read views of Eric Schmidt on the subject. Bang on target – Eric steered clear of what a personalized news reader should be, and just highlighted that the increase in the personalized (also mobile) devices which we use to consume info will automatically lead to need for personalizing the content itself. However, looking at personalized news from someone else's eyes, I for the first time am realizing that for all the good efforts of the geek world – humans may not need personalized news after all ! By personalized news I mean, the news which I as an individual am interested in. For example some ways to determine the classifications for such news are: All News from sources chosen by me Any News related to the topics which I am interested in (Sports / tech etc) News being read by people in my network (colleagues, friends, family) News which relates to any entity i...

Continuing the chain of thought from my previous post , I got thinking as to whether the changes in the Indian economy since 1990's have been top down and visionary or merely reactionary and ad-hoc. The conclusion which I have reached has been that they are a combination, but above all - they are based on a Groundswell from the masses. While multiple sectors - IT, Retail, Financial Services and even manufacturing - have contributed to rise of the Indian Tiger; to illustrate my point, I would concentrate on the Financial Sector [ related post ]. Pre-liberalization, there were many shackles, like license raj, on the Indian financial services sector. But more gruesome were the factors of immature or absent regulatory supervision and resulting power of large investors to manipulate the free markets. The Banking sector meanwhile was dominated by PSU banks which were slow, bureaucratic and customer unfriendly. Starting the 90s there were many top down reforms starting like Dematerializ...

I have previously pointed a lot of links [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]to Atanu Dey's blog, also praising his RISC model for development of Indian rural/semi-urban areas. However, this comment on his blog (by someone with an alias Human Blasphemy ) sets out some very pertinent doubts on this model - reproducing it here: Dear Atanu, I heard you during your session on RISC at XIMB. One of the members asked you a question whether Rural Infrastructure can be developed through people’s participation and through microfinance. Which according to you is not possible, because large infrastructure projects have to be completed at one go. But the problem is that why will any private company invest in rural infrastructure? You only said that i dont know how it will be possible. I believe you will agree that in future Microfinance will not remain microfinance it will become SM-finance [Small and medium finance. We have already seen the examples of increased limits of credit in Andhra Pradesh, where Mf loans ...