Corollary

Corollary, a word that one encounters many times in the engineering studies. Like the Fick’s Law for Diffusion, Newton Law for Momentum Transfer or Fourier Law for Heat Transfer.
Do not worry if you do not know these laws, I have no intention to talk about these laws. The point I am trying to make is that there exists some basic fundamentals in all streams upon which the rules are built. We can easily visualize one concept in terms of another one that we have already studied earlier and it becomes easier to digest.

After such a long time, I recently found another corollary in management discipline and though not extremely helpful, I felt good in founding the analogy. Let me start with Operations Management and the concepts of inventory management. The key aspect is that the inventory should be minimal possible because it is a capital blocked with no returns. But it is required to tackle the uncertainty in the operations arising due to market or processes. If there is a sudden increase in demand you can push more products into the market by utilising the inventory of finished goods and at the same time you can increase the throughput utilizing your raw materials inventory. So you keep inventory at various levels. If everything is predictable, one does not require the inventory. Do not worry I am not going into more detail!

Now comes the Macroeconomics. You have deposits with the bank and then you have deposits (reserves) with the central bank. The more reserves in central bank, more capital is blocked with no returns. The more deposits available with the bank, more money it can lend to the market forces for investments/operations/production. Reserves with Central Bank are like buffer kept for unforeseen demand/supply. So if everything is stable in the market, the reserves maintained by the central bank are of no use. To meet the daily transaction requirement with customers banks also keep cash with them in their vaults which again yield no return as such.

So you see corollary here. The Reserves with Central bank are nothing but an Inventory of money to provide for uncertainties in the money market. I wonder if Dimensional Analysis can be applied to the management science discipline.

Marketing 'Marketing'

Well, the first word represents the verb and the second word represents the subject. What else do you expect? If marketing is not able to sell marketing then it will defy its name. You will recollect what you might have already heard many times that Marketing is an Art. Now do you think there is any way to teach something which is an art, perhaps Not. Still, marketing is a subject well written and taught in B-schools.

Just to give you some background, I had one of the courses in the first term on basics of marketing. It was nothing but a collection of approaches that marketers take in different situation. There are no laws, theories no rules. This is because marketing deals with human mind, human behaviours and catering to human desires. If it were to me marketing is best taught by field work and the approaches one should take to market product will automatically evolve over a period of time.

For e.g. when one realizes that there are competing products in the market he will automatically highlight the attributes that differentiate his product from the other competing products, marketers call this POD (point of differentiation). Many times he will select a few individual who he thinks are more likely to purchase his product, they have glorified it by giving it a term ‘targeting’. If the customers seem a little reluctant to purchase the product at a given price, he may offer them some free gifts/discounts/rebate coupons, they call it ‘promotion’. He decides upon whether to sell the product by a retail outlet or directly sell the product or sell over the internet, they call it ‘Marketing Channels’.

These points as I have discussed above still is not loaded so as to compete with other disciplines in MBA. So, they have packaged these terms into different terms and called them Mix. So there we see all the Mix of Mix. Marketing Mix, Promotion Mix, Brand Mix etc. and 4Ps, 4Cs etc. There is a book written about these CONCEPTS and it is termed as the Bible of marketing. But at the end of the course I realized that all that 400 pages (or 500, I do not know the exact number of pages) can be summarized into 40-50 pages and the book will lose identity. The book itself is a well packaged product. It includes graphics, visuals and real life examples from the industry. The colour combination and paper quality is good. Finally, marketing as a management discipline and the book, both are selling successfully in the market.Now this is what we call marketing isn’t.

Scratch Pad - Science and Society

At the beginning of earth formation, we know all the continents were joined together, they separated. Then the continents got divided into nations, nations into states and states are fighting with each other and within themselves we have more states, practically.

Almost all the nations are troubled with internal conflicts within the state, some states demanding separations from the nations. Within those states there are communities/tribes demanding separate states. Take an example in India, Pakistan, Russia, Afghanistan etc.
The human generation got divided into races, races into religions, religions into caste and caste into sub-caste.

Let us go back to our solar system. The distances between every two heavenly bodies are increasing, i.e. the universe is expanding. Why is it expanding rather than shrinking owing to the gravitational forces of the other heavenly bodies? Is it because of diffusion, i.e. the heavenly bodies are very much concentrated in the Milky Way and they are diffusing outside where the density (if I can use the term here) of heavenly bodies is less.

How do we see all these things put together?
I recall a Law that I studied in my engineering course, Law of entropy, which states that every mass of body/molecule behave in such a manner to increase the entropy of the system. Entropy means the degree of randomness in the system.Does it apply here? Can we say that the law of entropy holds here?

Let us say that it may hold in the solar system but what about human civilization, the continents, countries, states, culture, religion, does it apply here as well. Can I take it further and say that if it follows these laws, the it may follow equilibrium lar as well. How we can fit the equilibrium into this? What will be the equilibrium state of division of human civilization into religion, cast and sub-caste.

Say, the religion continue division into caste, caste into sub-caste etc. At one point, people will realize that they are very few left, so they will again dilute the last criteria of division. So there is a threshold size of a group (political or social) that seems to be sufficient for self sustainence. Any less than that people are afraid of sidelined by the other groups, so either they will merge their group with other group or they will break other bigger group and import some group member into their group. This is what happens in the society, small religious groups regroup with others and bigger groups split into smaller one. Some groups are dissolved completely and at the same time new groups are evolved.

Can someone fit a equation on this phenomenon and find the equilibrium state, with groups as molecules and individuals as atoms, so at equilibrium atoms are changing their association with molecules but at a larger level the composition remains same. It will be a nice world then!

All for a brand IIT, Contd....

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/Careers/Second_list_IITs_break_tradition/articleshow/3342429.cms
This is what I was afraid of, and have written in the previous post.
This is just the begining, now after 3-4 years there will be demand to reduce the academic rigour and that will be the last nail in the coffin.

Advantages of Democracy...........

All this for a Brand IIT

All for a Brand IIT

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/IIT_physics_cut-off_down_to_zero_as_seats_increase/articleshow/3316557.cms

I had no plan to write blog today, but the article made me write.

It hurts! You increase the seats, You pull the OBC up, You pull the poorer people up, You do anything that you want to do but not at the cost of the quality.

The brand IIT is only because of the quality and quality is what people value. It has taken at least 40 years to build the brand IIT, if not more. One wrong decision can undo all this. I feel very sad if all this happens for votes and politics.

I am not against increasing the seat, giving ‘allowances’ to some, but do the politicians care about people not making it in the IITs. They can push people in, but believe me it’s not easy to get out. I have seen people spoiling their 4-7 years and not making it out. Those who are getting the all sympathy for increasing the seat will be responsible for spoiling the lives of the same people who they think they care. Media only covers when politician (decision makers !) announce ‘increase in seats’ for the benefit for ‘Aam Aadmi’, media fails to cover how these students are performing in IIT, I think they should start presenting that picture to the public. It’s only us, the insider who know the truth.

This will only increase the pressure on the ‘not so elite’ students once they are in the IITs and competing among the other ‘competitive’ ones.

Just by pushing them in does not mean the job is done. This will increase the drop out rates in IITs, another intelligent politician will then order IITs to relax on the academic rigour to help people get out of IIT!

They will sight reasons for increased pressure amongst students, increase in number of suicides (believe me I won’t be surprised), and I am sure they will succeed in lighten the academic rigour.
There are very few things that world values for India, preserve it, I want to preserve it and am sure every alumni do as well.

Scratch Pad - Genius, Then and Now

We have read many theories that are universally accepted, many theorists who proposed such theories are admired in their respective fields. Sometimes they are referred to have being contributed in other fields as well. While I was going through the many theories of motivation suggested by many ‘Researchers’, every theory different from the previous one in some aspect still there is a consistent need for new theory because group behaviour is such a complex process that you can not really put it in the framework of theories.

No, do not get afraid, I am not proposing a new theory for motivation. What I am thinking is that whenever I come across any big researcher, inventors, scientists etc. all those theories existed for a long time. Take an example, Newton Laws of motion, Ohm Law, Fick's law of diffusion, Bernoulli's principle etc. Pardon me for my engineering background, is that the reason! There are no new theory coming up, I am not saying that the research is not happening these days, the research is definitely happening and even at a faster rates but there are not breakthrough theories coming up, that are widely accepted and universally recognized. Well, you may disagree with me here because my knowledge may be very limited.

Still I am puzzled, is it that all the research that could have been done is already been done in all the fields at macro level and whatever research is currently being done is all at micro level for e.g. particle dynamics, nanotechnologies etc. So there are no theories of say solid mechanics or fluid mechanics or thermodynamics, conduction, convection, mass transfer etc. (Again pardon me for sounding a bit technical).

There is a huge scope of research if we go deeper and I believe that we are yet to find any universal principle at this micro/nano level that can be accepted as universal law. Every hypothesis gets refined every five year or so to improve on its applicability and accuracy. Is it what it should be or our research is actually not able to converge to one direction? Is it that while researching on these micro/nano aspects we ourselves are doing Brownian research (getting some inspiration from Brownian motion), and therefore it being happening in every direction and actually difficult to converge.

Or is it that the earlier scientist/theorists were well capable to take their research in one discrete direction and finally result in a universally acceptable law. Or is it that there were lack of scientist community to actually counter a theory proposed by someone. Or is it that there are no more theory left at the macro level that hasn’t been proposed yet and therefore we have successfully explained all macro level phenomenon.

I am sure that there are a lot more number of researchers/scientist today, with a lot more knowledge at their disposal, working on a lot more complex and efficient equipment and driven by a lot more funds and motivation. I am also sure there are a lot more technical papers published in international journals and this trend is going to be the same in the years to come.

Still, isn’t there is one macro level phenomenon that is not yet been discovered or observed and hence there is a scope of at least one new law that will be quickly accepted universally. I am definitely not the person who can comment on this question.

Next Scarce Resource

I was contemplating to write on this for long. Recently when the UPA govt. increased the petrol/diesel prices, our PM addressed the whole nation trying to educate people that the government had no option left but to increase the prices. Trying to educate the people that there is little that govt. can do as these are global factors affecting all the countries and India in one of them. He also shared with the citizens what were the possible alternatives that the govt. could have tried and their limitation and finally they increased the prices. Some people may disagree with this saying that government has levied so many duties and taxes on petrol/diesel at the first place and they should first give concessions on that front. Well I am not writing this to detail out the proportion of taxes, their objective, their requirement and etc. So pardon me for this.

What I want to discuss is the vision that Mr. PM has, one should listen to that message he delivered to the citizens on that day. He is truly an economist because economics is all about efficient and effective use of scarce resources. He is also a true leader because he made a point to make people aware about another daily resource which is not scarce at this point of time, but the early indication are visible on the horizon. Please forgive me if you feel/perceive that I am praising Mr. PM too much. Believe me, I do not have any vested interest in politics and I am not planning to join the concerned political party (because in that case I should be praising someone else!).

What I want to highlight is that he is planning for the future, crude is the present, he is taking necessary steps, but at the same time he is warning people to be aware that such situation might arise again in future and we should start planning for that right from today. I am not that skilled yet to sense if this ‘future problem’ provide any opportunity for business idea, but I am sure key people in the industry must be having some plans to address the situation in the future for the benefit of the people, of course if they take in the philanthropist context. You can relate few M&A in this space by one of the big Indian houses, though the scale of operation as of now is very small. It may take may be 10-15 years before people do realize and accept this as a major challenge but it is always good to start planning now, especially in India where the execution take so long, may be this is the reason Mr. PM mentioned this right away without waiting.

I do not think I mentioned earlier in this post that he said ‘Water’. Thanks Mr. PM for hoping against all odds.

India Growth Story?

The recent IIP numbers are in the downward trend. Analyst are citing these are temporary set backs, comparison to high base numbers (IIP data) from last year, and global slow down.

Crude has touched $135 and Indian basket is around $122. With OIL marketing companies making a loss of Rs16/- and Rs27/- per liter of petrol and diesel and Rs320/- (approx) per LPG cylinder, I wonder if there is any more stem left! BPCL and HPCL are talking of quota set of each individual oil distributor based on the sales last year.

There was a BRIC report sometime back, now people are talking about report by a Goldman Sachs analyst who predicted that crude will touch $200.

Government is doing well by artificially controlling the prices but this is not a permanent measure, they should be doing (I hope) more than this. They should explore various methods of transferring the crude burden partly to consumers who can afford it and at the same time not impacting the inflation. They have to selectively subsidize the core functions of economy from the crude burden but leave the affluent class (and the emerging middle class) to pay for their petrol bill. By core functions I mean transportation of industrial goods, power generations etc.

Rupee surged to all time high of around 39.5 w.r.t $ and it is back to 43.5, thanks to high crude import bill.

Indian agriculture growth statistics are not exciting, this coupled with shrinking land under irrigation, dismal condition of Indian farmers and unpredictable nature of monsoon only indicate that situation is going to get worse.

Though it is projected that the wheat production is set to increase but I am not really sure it would be able to satisfy the ever increasing need of growing economy. And what about wheat production for coming years! Do we have plan for that in the pipeline or we are just relying on the monsoons of those respective years.

Not only agriculture, other building blocks of economy, capital goods, power sector, inland transport and ports & harbor infrastructure, all of these need significant investments, I wonder how government will fund these requirements.

Recently there was a news that Thailand was planning a cartel of ‘Rice Exporting Nations’ and there was a huge cry among the international community. I feel the way OPEC is able to monopolize the Crude market; the day is not far where the other commodity producing nation will form the other sorts of cartel and the world will again move back to the barter system.

P.P.

Remember the term!!! What comes to your mind when you read this title?

This was very prevalent term in my childhood days. I have sympathy to this term that has lost its existence in the rapidly growing Indian economy. The changes in Indian lifestyle may not have been really significant but when it comes to this technology, it has been drastic. I am trying to steal some time before I start discussing about the term, just trying to give you sometime to start thinking in back of your mind about this term. If you are able to recollect, it’s great and if not, then this will provide more impact to the next paragraph where I have given some sort of tribute to this ‘not so frequently’ used term nowadays, and I have complete sympathy for it.

It used to be an acronym for non-personal phone number. The local language full-form used to be “Padosi Phone”. Now you realize how abandoned this term has become. With the increasing number of mobile phone connections day-by-day, still reducing tariffs and increasing competition in the market, everyone has a mobile, India is set to takeover US in terms of mobile phone subscribers. Needless to say there is no need for this term anymore in Indian scenario. May be the term is still in use in distant places/village but with the rapid “celluraization” of Indian villages, I really do not think it will be able to sustain itself in the running language. It is one of the endangered non living species that is set to extinct as one of side effects of human technological growth.

Earth Day

Thanks to the autorickshaw strike, I took my vehicle to the office. Later I realized that today is earth day (thanks to google), and I thought I should have used public transport instead. It’s a separate story that all the public transport buses are overcrowded today, again because of auto-rickshaw strike.

I also started thinking am I doing something from my side to reduce my carbon footprint. ‘Carbon footprint’ a nice term coined by some nice people who care for the planet. But how many of us are actually aware of this. Rather how many of us actually bother about the same. I believe the time has come for all of us to move upwards, those who are aware should start bothering and those who are not aware should develop awareness.

I am not a environmentalist, but I can certainly recollect few of the past events that was lucky enough to have given coverage by media.

· There were non seasonal rain in some part of Delhi, TN (or Andra).
· India is facing huge shortage of food grains, should be worldwide problem
· There was a recent fight between two Indian states regarding setting of one water project
· Drought in Australia….. I mean Rice production (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/worldbusiness/17warm.html)
· And everyone know about melting of glaciers
· And many others that I am not probably aware of….

If you pull out some of your precious time and think about all these events together they indicate one and one thing – a global imbalance.

Once I was watching discovery and I remember the episode focused on new buildings that are ecofriendly – they require less lights inside and are well lit by sunlight during the day, they recirculate the water used etc.

You already must be aware Honda is testing hydrogen powered car somewhere, tata has launched green batteries, two days back there was news that India’s largest private sector company was probably in talks with world largest fuel cell manufacturer to set up a plant in India….. so that means people are doing some stuff around cutting down emissions, partly because it gives huge publicity, partly it readies you for what can become a necessity in future and partly (I hope) morally as they have the right resources with them (capital, manpower, technology etc.)

At the same time I also believe time has come that we ourselves change our daily activities to an extent that we are able to reduce our own carbon footprint. How do we do that, I leave it to individuals.

Cricket League

ICL has already completed few matches, IPL matches are schedule to start very shortly and I was once thinking that it can very easy for any influential person to do Match-Fixing in these kind of scenario.

Given the different stakeholder in international matches, different authorities, different cultures, different languages and different sentiments, even then if people are able to do match-fixing for international matches……… in national league its anyone’s game.

Anyway, I am not convinced that cricket league in India is focused on nurturing new talent…. I think it is a factory to generate cash.
Government should levy a tax on BCCI, and the amount should be used for development of other cash-deprived sports in India.

A "Star-full" Sky

This is about my recent visit to my hometown in Rajasthan. With my limited vocabulary I am not able to find the right set of words to describe my feeling. I was not only visiting my hometown after eight long years, but also I was about to visit rather stay in the house that we built eight years ago and did not get a chance to really stay there. I was surprised to see a lot more of open spaces replaced by houses (Bungalows), many branded stores but the same cramped roads, thanks to a lot more of traffic.

Cutting the long story short, what I want to discuss here is the feeling when I looked at the sky in the night. To my surprise it was full of stars, can you believe it? May be, you can but I couldn’t. I am not very sure if it was very stupid of me, feeling extremely happy after looking at the “Star-full Sky” (A sky full of stars!).

There may be multiple reasons for that. May be people in Bombay do not get the sufficient share of their sky-window to look at the stars. Or they do not just get the time to stare at the sky. OR they can not just find stars in the sky because of the pollution that Mumbai has and by the evening the atmosphere is covered under a thick layer of pollution that even if you want, you can not find a star. You can only see the moon because that is too bright as compared to the stars. The reason can be any or all of them.

After recuperating from the sudden feeling of joy, I realized that even the sky at that time was not really the sky I had seen eight years back at the same place. So may be the pollution factor is still there in this small city which in fact is one of the emerging industrial cities in Rajasthan.

Does that mean after that the visible number of stars are going to reduce with the time and only the more bright ones will be able to sustain the attack of pollution? Is goes by saying – it’s a cut-throat competition only the bright candidates will be able to manage it in the long run. If you are not bright, you can not be sight(ed).

Does it further mean that the stars in the sky will one day become countable? No longer will it be used as an example of countless by a poet, no longer it can puzzle a child trying to count the stars…… Just No Longer!

I desperately wanted to act like poet not because I love to, but because it is always the poet who pen down the unimaginable and in case this happen I wanted to capture the same.

Who knows that in the years to come “star-full” will become a frequently used metaphor.