Ek Ad. Ek Kalam.

Yesterday, I was riding to work in an autorickshaw and saw a Surf Excel detergent ad on the back of the driver's seat. Curious, I wanted to find out how Hindustan Lever (maker of Surf) does its auto-channel marketing campaign because it was quite effective: I - with my limited interests in the sparkling marvels of laundry - noticed it. There are about 150,000 auto rickshaws in Mumbai - though the backs of the canopies are used for film ads, the insides are hardly ever used. The autorickshaws are predominantly used by burgeoning middle-class and can be a good channel for consumer-oriented communication strategies.

Responding to my WIFM (what's in for me) question, the driver said, "Ek kalam dete hain"...I thought I didn't hear it right...he repeated, "Ek kalam - pen, pen - dete hain...aur woh chalta bhi nahin hai!" [They gave a pen that doesn't even work!]. Amazing! I'm not sorry for the auto-driver; I'm just impressed with HLL for the simplicity in its execution.

Today I squeezed someone's gall bladder

It felt like a semi-deflated, tight balloon...it was weird. Before you think Hannibal Lecter, let me explain - I was at the most amazing exhibition ever called Bodies The Exhibition in NYC. It had 30 dissected cadavers and 250 body parts from multiple dimensions (imagine the muscles and skeleton of someone who is dribbling a basketball - if you can't - here's the picture). The exhibits (someone's bodies) took about 10 years to dissect and the detail is totally worth it! The section on the circulatory system, shows exhibits of blood vessels glowing bright red in a dark background. While the foetus section was difficult and horrific, it still was scientifically mindboggling - in one exhibit you can actually see a 24 week baby in the uterus - to comprehend that one cell that is created from nothing and grows into a live, kicking entity that has thousands of functioning activities inside it for years together + with an ability to constantly heal itself despite heavy abuse was truly something. In the "touching allowed" section, the lady there showed me a normal, clean lung - it was off-white with some green spots (pollution-effect) and then a smoker's lung, which was shrunken, green-black-brown and woah...really bad. She also showed me what fat and cholesterol did to someone's aorta - it was ugly brown-black (like the inside of a bark of a dead tree) - truly a sad state with large protruded spots on it. I shuddered to think how much we bash up our insides. And I curiously poked my finger into a real heart and held it in both my hands and looked on for a long time. The brain was a solid mass and it was coolly weird to lift it up and examine the cerebellum and other good stuff. By that time, my brother had had enough of me and the other still bodies - he got hungry despite the displays and we finally stepped out. The company organizing it is $13M Premier Exhibitions (NASDAQ: PRXI) / RMS Titanic (!) and has been in multiple controversies - not surprisingly - for its exhibitions. Kudos!

Basic flaw with Indian educational system

Recently, I met a post-doc in U-Michigan who moved to Ann Arbor from Stanford, where he completed his Ph.D (did his engineering in IIT-Madras and played classical violin on national radio in his earlier life). In our varied discussions, I learned that he was moving to India soon -- to teach. Curious, I inquired (assumed), "Ah, so you must be going to one of the IITs/ engineering schools to teach and then you might even be able to make time for research." To my surprise, he said no ("no interest in research or engineering") and that he just wanted to teach high-school children. I didn't immediately see the connection but it got me thinking...later it fell into place.

In our (Indian) educational system, we are taught to learn mostly by rote. The sky is blue. 25x25 = 625. (a+b)*(a-b) = a^2 - b^2. E= MC^2. Chemical equations, mathematical formulae, historical facts....we can "mug it all up." Parents sit with their children at 5AM to help them memorize multiplication tables (on the US side, the obsession is possibly with spelling-bees). So what's the problem? In their focus to just learn, children fail to inquire why the sky is blue - oh, it's because of refraction - how exactly, does refraction make it blue? - what's the whole story and where does this blue thing fit in? I see that this method of learning (or thinking) creeps into the workplace and it hurts - for e.g. in software programming - the newbee programmer will tend to program in silos and is unable to plan for the whole and write individual code that has a more wholistic grasp of the bigger problem that it is trying to solve - code that has perspective. It's a problem that my cousin (the same RFID guy) is tearing his hair about - trying to get some work done from India. There's no question that there are notable exceptions and also there are good and bad programmers everywhere - but that's not the point - this is a general issue. I see similar concerns even in other lines of work - for e.g. in executing a process-oriented task, professionals typically tend to ignore bringing in the big-picture perspective into individual activities - asking, why am I doing what I'm doing and what bigger problem is this trying to solve? You will exactly know what I'm talking about (and be nodding) if you've only faced it! Finally, excellent work does get done (that's why the Satyams, Infys have thrived) but it also requires more minds, brute-force (dubbed shadow workforce) - and requires to be led by someone who brings that perspective. The reasons for this are very basic - much simpler than one would imagine and it's our obsession to learn things by rote (even in a Google-world) and not asking (rather, thinking) - at the right time - why really is the sky blue?

I know what you will do next summer...

It's amazing when I "wake up" to a new technology/ business solution...I frown about the sleep but then hey, I wake up nevertheless...I'm currently in NY and my cousin who dabbles with RFID technology (he actually has an RFID printer, reader and countless tags in his study!) educated me on how his company (a ubiquitous tech product co) helps baby-carrot farmers to teddy-bear manufacturers tag their individual products so that down the value-chain, Walmart can track them! I wanted to examine this a little further...Walmart has been in the act since 2004 and has arm-twisted its suppliers in Texas to get going on smart-tagging their products by 2006 (along with 37 volunteers + I hear, California as well). The applications for RFID are all over - particularly in logistics but also in banking (tagging Euros to stop counterfeiting), retail (Mark and Spencers' will suggest matching ties when you buy a shirt), shrimp farming (imagine tracking a little dead shrimp all the way to the mouth of the eater - kidding!) - it's fascinating. Alien Technologies and Matrics are companies spinning the little chips that are quickly replacing barcodes. Currently their smart stickies cost $0.20/ pop and my cousin says it'll soon drop to 10 cents or lower - Economist says by 2009, it'll drop to a fraction of a cent and possibly trillions of RFIDs (literally) will be floating around. Now, will the world then really look like they potrayed in Matrix - do you want the red pill or the blue pill?