What I Learned

I wasn’t a great fan of investing in MFs till recently when some of my investor friends finally succeeded in luring me to over 40% tax free RoI that some of these offer in spite of the warning that “MF investments are subject to market risks. Please read offer document carefully before investing. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future returns”. It sounds like warning on a pack of cigarettes and it seems as if banks have lobbied to regulators for it to protect their fixed deposits. J Once I was convinced, I decided to start SIPs for all the members in our joint family of 9, including kids. That’s when the fun started. Below are some observations and learnings. I called a friend who runs an investment advisor shop to advice on how to get started. He turned up the same afternoon and explained to me in detail for an hour the advantages of investing in MFs in spite of me telling that I am ready to ‘start’. He said he’ll identify the funds we should invest in and send forms

I was reflecting on various software systems I had opportunities to work on in last 20 years, initially as a VC++ programmer, then as a project manager, and now as CEO of an offshore IT Services company, Harrier Information Systems. I feel, regardless of the technology, team, project manager or business domain, the single most important factor that separates a system that nobody uses from the one that nobody realizes exists while using it daily; is the software architecture of the system. We have delivered several software systems that customers use daily like Air without realizing those exist till they require an enhancement once in a while. We also had a couple of those that failed to ever go ‘live’. First, a few successes... We developed a custom ETL tool that processes millions of records every month, and it just works! There is a process automation system and another one for equity research that are working smoothly for years! Another web-based reporting tool h

Banking is moving towards making ATMs almost like a branch where most of the basic banking transactions can be done using technology. This encourages banks to avoid opening branches in general, and particularly in rural areas where there is a huge less-literate population that is unable to use an ATM and requires someone to talk to for banking. I am wondering, when we can use ATM of any bank irrespective of where we have our account, how about allowing customers to use the branch of any bank irrespective of the bank where one has the account? Imagine the impact of this on inclusive banking in rural areas where bank branches are far and few in between. This may provide more reasons to have a bank account for huge rural population that avoids banking and prefers cash for lack of easy access to bank branches in smaller villages. This may also encourage banks for have more branches for opportunities to cross sell products, apart from additional revenue from potential service ch

I like responding to emails immediately unless I am waiting for some information or am dependent on something for a decision. Some friends suggested I should wait for a few hours or a couple of days before replying to an email, as an indication of being busy to avoid being perceived as unoccupied or desperate. Having lived and worked in the US and India; and now working with clients in developed nations as well as in India, I see some marked work-cultural differences in perception about ones promptness. (With the risk of generalization) If you respond to emails immediately to someone in the US, it is 'generally' taken positively as a sign of your respect for the person and her/his time, your eagerness to work with the person or the project, and your professionalism (with 'auto-response' about potential delay in response). In India, immediate response may be seen as a sign of you being less occupied or being desperate to move ahead with a project or an orde

Here is a real customer service episode we had recently. I was in a meeting with a client when she told me that she will be traveling overseas next week and would like to show a demo of the web-based application we just developed for them. She was unsure about having Internet access while abroad and she could not carry a heavy laptop for health reasons. I carry a Sony Vaio Ultrabook (about 1 Kg. in weight) as a Windows based alternative to Macbook Air. I suggested we'll deploy the web-app on the ultrabook and she could demo it from 'localhost' without needing Internet access. We agreed on the solution and the deployment started. As soon as we deployed the app on the Ultrabook, Murphy made his first mark! We realized the charting library we used in the system only works when the user is connected to the Net. This is OK in most cases as user would typically access the system over the Web, but we were preparing for a 'standalone' scenario. Thankfully we

1. To Learn 2. To Help/Serve 3. To Create/Produce 4. To Love 5. To Act 6. To speak the truth 7. To be polite 8. To be clean and to keep my surroundings clean What am I NOT here for? 1. Not to Hate 2. Not to Fight 3. Not to get intoxicated 4. Not to say bad words 5. Not to only Talk 6. Not to lie 7. Not to cheat 8. Not to hurt 9. Not to compare 11. Not to be corrupt 12. Not to Borrow

Did we know how to walk when we were born? We learned that. Did we know how to speak at the time of birth? We learned that too. Did we know initially the language we speak? We all learned our mother tongue. Did we take a crash course on parenting before getting married? Still most of us got married and have a family. Point is, there are hundreds of things we learned since birth and keep on learning daily. I believe, one of the purposes of life is to learn and to share/pass-on the learning, while continue to learn afresh every day. That is the reason, I get upset when someone avoids some task saying I haven’t done that before or I don’t know how to do it rather than saying please allow me a little extra time to figure it out and do it, or I need to learn it and then do it so it may take a little longer. I’ll be very worried the day I don’t learn something new. I know some close relatives who say they don’t want to read or learn new stuff as they are almost reti

Navaratri Dandia is a great leveler where every one dances together forgetting all differences. Below are some thoughts I had while playing Garaba this evening. I guess the positive energy in the atmosphere there gave me these thoughts. Jai Mata Di! When I was born, TV was a luxury in India and it had basic state-run phone service and automobile in the form of an indigenous car, Ambassador and a Mahindra Jeep; forget about computers. Today, I use a mobile phone with Internet access, write this on a laptop computer, and drive a fancy car (by Indian standards :-)). In half a lifetime, we have transitioned from no TV or car, to TVs, mobiles, Internet and (soon) self-driving cars, while looking forward to NetWorld (IoT) and smart homes. I read literature in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English while eating Gujarati cuisine and developing computer software for American/European/Australian and Indian clients from my office in a tier-2 Indian city. Isn’t that amazingly fortunate?

Thanks to a close friend KK, I recently read an article on ‘Internet of things’ available at http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527361/the-economics-of-the-internet-of-things/ . Sharing below some thoughts, ideas and possibilities which came to mind while reading it. When ‘everything’ is connected and can communicate, everything may be tracked till its end or destruction. So… Nothing may ever be lost as we’ll know exactly where everything is. Portable things will notify us of their location! This also means … Each piece of every product will be tracked to its consumption and may provide tremendous insight into how, when and where a product is consumed and possibly, by whom. It may easy to know where expired medicines, or rotten food is lying, and to be able to collect it. Similarly, it may be easy to know where is junk lying to send someone to collect it. It will be easy to know upfront which implant in the body of a patient is about to malfunction to be able to rep

Are you struggling to find developers with expertise on Java technology platform? You are not alone! Many companies with legacy or new software systems to be maintained or developed using Java technologies are experiencing a similar situation. They are also struggling to keep their Java developers from leaving for greener postures due to a surge in demand for Java developers. I am observing this trend for last about 12 months before venturing into writing about it with confidence. Today, the situation looks similar to the one for COBOL developers during Y2K crises in 1999. There was acute shortage of developers with expertise on mainframe technologies like COBOL, AX400 and CICS. Emerging and newer technologies like Java script frameworks like Bootstrap, JQuery; Big Data technologies like MongoDB and Hadoop, and mobile apps development on Android and iOS are competing with Java EE, and offer alternatives to developers to make their career in. These newer technologies make i

The other day, I was discussing with a friend, about using solar power at large scale, considering the huge potential India has for solar power generation. India has great potential and Rajasthan, Gujarat alone can take care of all India requirement (Evacuation infrastructure to be planned and executed). For rooftop solar power generation like at parking lots, airports, bus ports, commercial buildings, canals, malls, and railway stations (all rooftops), just need regulatory support called "Net Metering". I feel, though net-metering would be ideal, and is required for large scale production of solar energy and requires regulatory support, and hence it may take a few more years as government typically takes its own sweet time for any regulation to pass. I feel we should strive to meet all out energy needs using Solar power and it may happen soon with falling prices of panels and improving technology! I have a dream of having zero electric bill at home and office and d

I restarted swimming after a gap of many years, thanks to my son, Om, as he is learning to swim these days. While swimming this morning, I was looking at all the half-naked co-swimmers in the pool and wondering about their names, religion, sexual orientation etc., and I knew none of this about them. Still I was there in the open pool with them with minimum clothing required. For national integration, we should promote and encourage swimming across the country. Everybody in the pool is naked with bare minimum clothing. So, most of the physical barriers between us are gone. We hardly know anybody’s name, cast, religion and other attributes except that they are fellow humans who love to swim. The more we swim together, more we live together as humans. We should make swimming our national sport. It may even help reduce water pollution and increase water conservation as people will have more emotional connect with water as a vital resource beyond drinking and bathing. We all s

I was a booth volunteer on booth 52 (Tilak Vidyalay, Dhantoli) in Nagpur on April 10th when polling for 2014 General elections took place in Nagpur. We came across many voters having valid voter ID cards but their names were missing from the voter list provided by the election commission. They were moving from one booth to another to check their names in the list. These voters could not cast their votes in the election in spite of having valid IDS. Next day we read in the newspapers that there are about 60000 voters whose names are missing from the list in Nagpur. I request the election commission of India to look into the matter and correct the voter list ASAP. On a different note, currently polls are being done in phases and I heard that the EVMs will be stored at the safe and secured place to be opened on the day of counting. How about attaching data/SIM cards to EVMs to securely transfer voting data to a central computer server at the end of the voting day so that the data for a

When I see proliferation of digital devices and increasing use of those in e-learning, I wonder if the generations a few years later would be writing with hands or using digital devices. I guess, the biggest sacrifice for using digital technologies would be our ability to write with hand and pen. Manual writing may become an art-form like painting or a sport like horse riding, archery and shooting. Pen may join swords, guns, tape cassettes, floppy discs and CDs in museums a few years from now. It may join calligraphy as a special skill set one learns out of interest than out of a need.

After reading the report of the committee to recommend data format for furnishing of credit information to CICs, below are a few of my comments. 1.       The report repeats many of its recommendations several times and could be made concise to save time for a reader 2.       How about recommending making CIR available on mobile devices of consumers who have subscribed for those? 3.       How about a  separate value added product for consolidated CIR for a whole family living at the same address? This may make it easy for CIs to get CIR for a family seeking credit jointly. 4.       Similarly,  How about a  Commercial CIR for a group of companies run by members of a family, as a separate value added product? 5.       Wherever possible, with their consent in loan application forms, how about providing links to social media profiles of users to CICs and into CIRs? This may help CIs learn more about a borrowers’ ‘likes’, 'circles' etc. for better informed decision maki

Below is an idea for developing a location-based mobile app. In India, RBI allows customer of any bank to use ATM of any other bank to withdraw money, check balance, get a small statement of account etc. Banks are supposed to settle the transactions between them and pay each other some fee when their customer uses ATM of another bank (similar to telecom companies paying landing charges). So, banks incur a cost when their customer uses ATM of another bank, which they recover from the customer as transaction fee (free up to 5 transactions from ATMs of another bank). The proposed solution would detect if a customer of a bank is standing within 5 meters (configurable) of an ATM of another bank and would proactively send SMS to the customer with address of the nearest ATM of the bank where the customer has an account. This way, a bank may save money by informing their customers about their nearest ATM when a customer is likely to use ATM of another bank. The bank using the sol

Though I am not an expert in banking, I am wondering why we can’t have a common bank account for multiple asset classes like different currencies, gold and silver. If possible, also stocks in the same account? This may bring a lot of dormant wealth like gold and some foreign currency lying in households into the banking system. This makes even more sense in a country like India that is largest consumer of gold globally where huge amount is converted from currency to gold and silver every year. We may also allow an account holder overdraw cash by automatically marking a lien on the gold or silver held in her account. This way, loan against gold and silver may be automated for banked population. This may provide flexibility to an account holder and safe lending for banks. Rate of interest may vary based on the asset class (cash, gold or silver) and currency, as part of business rules for the account. This may also encourage financial inclusion by providing depositors a cho