Satire - Establishing a Secular Era

200-year old Hindu Temple in Jaipur, 2015
[image credit: unknown]

Whilst on the one hand the ruination wrought by Hindoo regressiveness on Indian society as a whole was recognized as an uncontestable truth, on the other hand, half-hearted efforts by successive governments playing to the Hindoo vote-bank had yielded at best temporary relief. Although some visible progress had been made in states like Kashmir, West Bengal, Kerala, and for a brief period along the coastal belt of the state of Andhra Pradesh, it was unanimously agreed by policy wonks, think-tank mavens, and public intellectuals of the nation that the time had come for a final solution to be implemented to deal once and for all with the lingering, festering problem. Hindoo orthodoxy posed grave threats to peace and tolerance not just in India, but the world over.

The Chakravarti Adarsh Lieberal

The Chakravarti Adarsh Lieberal rules over the circle of a dharma where it is but child’s play for to step in and step out of any of the seven steps below. It is what characterizes his or her greatness, and holds lessons for posterity for all.

1. The Harvest of Golden Silence
To be employed when the Adarsh Lieberal’s “own” are hollowing the moral fibre of the nation, gutting the economy, bludgeoning (to be applied literally, liberally, as well as metaphorically) the upright into submission. Preach forbearance. Practice silence. Pray for tolerance. Silence is golden. Silence is also the golden goose that lays golden eggs. The gold is mined by the honest people of the country. They will only hoard it as gold to be used for their false gods. Unless such gold is harvested, by the Adarsh Lieberal, whose silence yields a golden harvest, and while it’s not golden wheat, it does bring in the bacon, or beef – to be politically correct – a pink harvest, to be enjoyed over gin, rum, and all other manners of sophisticated intoxicants. Power, of course, is the biggest intoxicant, but it needs to be supplemented from time to time with the good stuff.

In The Plex - Bargain Hardcover cheaper than Kindle version

This is one of those things that gets a fair number of people riled up (post). The Kindle version of Stephen Levy's bestseller, "In The Plex", is now costlier than the Hardcover version. Amazon lists the Hardcover edition of the book as its #1 bestseller in its Business & Investing Books Bargain section.

Hardcover edition price: $10.40
Kindle Edition price: $12.99

Amazon is smart to list the Kindle price as a publisher-set price, but still, the fact that a Hardcover edition is 25% costlier than the ebook version does not seem fair. If it is ok to discount the hardcover print edition by this amount, why shouldn't the ebook version be available for even less? Yes, there are fixed costs with respect to the print edition that have to be recovered, and freeing up warehouse space by discounting the book does free up cash, but still...

And this is the case with other bargain bestsellers.
Sample #3 on the bestseller list for Business & Investing Books Bargain books: How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. The paperback edition is listed at a very attractive $5.98, while the ebook Kindle edition is priced at $8.16, 36% more than the paperback version.

Hardcover edition price: $5.98
Kindle Edition price: $8.16



In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
How We Decide

In The Plex - Hardcover vs. Kindle edition

How We Decide - by Jonah Lehrer

Amazon's Business & Investing › Bargain books page

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Yahoo Messenger Usability Riff

We are used to software behaving badly. Whether it is the "blue-screen-of-death" in Microsoft Windows, or the atrocious usability of the Apple iTunes product, or the myriad JavaScript errors encountered on Web pages, it is pain we endure with fortitude.

However, when the threshold of patience is low, the frustration just comes boiling to the fore.

Consider this screen. I got this when I tried to log in to the Yahoo Messenger client on Windows. It says "There was a problem signing you in to Yahoo! Messenger" because, ostensibly, "Our system is currently very busy." and that I should be considerate enough to "Please try again a little bit later."
Ok, so this is not very good since I need to be logged in to Yahoo Messenger, but I can appreciate the service telling me it is very, very, very busy. Fair enough.

But, I now scan the row of buttons below this message, and I start to scratch my balding pate, and make a Scooby Doo-ish huh sound. The message clearly states that it could not sign me in because it is "very busy". And I did enter my username and password, didn't I? So, firstly, why is it showing me the "New User..." button? Will signing in as a new user somehow make the system less busy? Or is it telling me that it does not like my current user id, and that it will strive to do better if only I were to present a different user id to it? Hmm... looks like the service is a little moody here.

 

How about the second button? "Forgot Password...". Sir, did you not just tell me, a line above, that the system is "very busy"? You didn't tell me that I had entered a wrong username or password, did you? You mean you don't know what the problem is? Or, that you think it is ok to display a standard list of buttons, no matter what the issue may really be? Your user-interface designers thought that consistency is better than usability? Or there was a budget crunch and they could not get the translations for new strings to display on these buttons? Or, you thought that somehow "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" is a better approach?

In the world of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and just about everything that is out there trying to be "social" and "friendly", you believe this Web 0.1 approach is going to fly? Yes, of course. Throw in a sad smiley and it will make things ok. Yes, we are living in the world of 1999, aren't we? Maybe an animated smiley?

And yes, one more thing that is wrong with this dialog - it is a modal dialog - if I need to go change my proxy settings, or type in a different username, or password, I first have to dismiss this modal dialog. Another usability misstep.

Sigh. There is so much to like at Yahoo! Yet somehow they have accepted an abysmally low level of mediocrity in everything they do.
Helpful is good.
Helpful and witty is also good, though sometimes annoying.
Helpful and useful is the ideal.
Mildly helpful and utterly confusing is not what you should aim for - which this dialog above does.

Some suggestions:

• Search Amazon.com for usability design
• Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules (Kindle)
• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design (Kindle)
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Kindle)

 

© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

American Auto Industry

Edited this post to add more content at the bottom.
Reading about these dramatic headlines, GM reports $2.5B 3Q loss, says it's running out of cash - San Jose Mercury News, , GM, Ford Post Losses as Liquidity Worsens - WSJ.com, GM: Huge loss leaves it almost out of cash - Nov. 7, 2008, and several more, it struck me that I do not really know of any good, comprehensive, and well written books on the American auto industry. There are several books on niche topics I am sure, like on the American fascination with muscle cars, or the cultural impact of the car, or even lots of books on the personalities that shaped the auto industry, especially Henry Ford. Then there are scores of books on the Toyota way, of the Japanese way of building cars, of incorporating feedback from everyone on the shop floor, and a miasma of books detailing management fads. But what I am looking for is more an analysis on when and where the American auto industry started to go wrong. I remember having a conversation with a colleague in Milwaukee in 1998. We were talking about Japanese and German cars, and how my American friend was stating that the Japanese just did not know how to build trucks, or that the minivan had been invented by the American industry, and that there would always be innovations that would happen that would keep the industry ahead of the imports. And my response was, that the American industry had retreated from one segment after another, and what was to prevent the Japanese or others from encroaching into more and more segments till there was nowhere left to hide. The Japanese started with small cars, the hatchbacks, and became good at making them. Detroit - GM, Ford, Chrysler - left that segment since it was too low margin, not profitable enough, and Honda and Toyota and Datsun were free to make these toy cars anyway. Every American would anyway buy a car made by Detroit eventually when they grew up. Then the Japanese entered the sedan market, till they were good at making these cars. Then the minivans (Odyssey, Sienna), the SUVs (Lexus RX, RAV4, Passport, CRV, etc...), the luxury cars (Lexus, Infinity, Acura), the trucks - till imports were everywhere, and beating Detroit on almost every parameter that counted: resale value, quality, reliability, comfort, drive quality, safety.

What is also evident, or at least should be, is that Detroit could not have NOT seen this coming. To be sure, you read about Saturn and GM's attempt to redefine the market in terms of how autos were sold. That was successful, for some time, but never on a scale that could make a tangible difference, nor successful enough to attract more followers. Issues of quality are easy enough to spot, and one could argue that quality is a matter of process and discipline. Quality is not about technology - almost everyone has access to the same technology. It is the processes that define how you go about quality, and with how much discipline that determines who builds the better car. Yet Detroit continued to lag behind imports on initial build quality metrics.

When it came to attacking international markets, it is illustrative to look at the Indian market. When the Indian market was opened up, while the Koreans came to India with new models, and with cars built for the Indian market, which were small, fuel efficient, Detroit chose to come with large, outdated models. The result is that Detroit has a minuscule share of the market, with no realistic expectations of any improvement there.

Even on designs, Detroit cars were seen as sometimes downright ugly, as with some Pontiac models, or just not good looking, as with the Ford Taurus that came out in 1995-96. They were either too huge, or simply not aesthetic looking. Design is of course a very subjective matter, but German designs were seen as consistently better (the Audi A4 for example), the Japanese imports as boring but never ugly.

Even when Detroit was losing market share, consistently, year after year, to imports, analysts and the industry was incredibly sanguine about it, looking at the financing arms of these companies that were hugely profitable on the back of the huge interest in leasing among consumers.

Anyway - looking for books on the American auto industry, that in particular looks at the last thirty odd years, leading upto the death spiral that it seems to be struggling with in 2008.

Search for books on the American automobile industry on Amazon.com





Adding a couple of more thoughts after publishing this post.
Firstly, also consider what Toyota did to compete even better with Detroit. They opened plants in the US. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, to build plants in the US. They trained American workers to work in these plants. States were eager to court Toyota because these plants represented an investment as well as jobs for hundreds of manufacturing jobs. These were blue collar jobs at a time when manufacturing had been on the wane for years and decades in the US, the shift towards a services oriented economy, outsourcing, and the move towards lower cost countries had laid low the manufacturing sector in the US. The point of this point is that Toyota was showing, and even proving that it was possible to build cars, in the US, with US workers, that were better than what Detroit had been able to come up with. Toyota also had other considerations to be sure; making a point to the Americans was not what they had at the top of their minds for sure. To hedge against and to protect against a strengthening yen (an expensive yen meant that cars exported to the US would be costlier, and therefore less competitive), and to help ward off the political fallout. Toyota creating jobs in the US would always make good copy in advertisements, which it did.

Secondly, consider the issue of fuel efficiency - Detroit had an attitude towards fuel efficiency that basically equated it with a lack of masculinity, of acting like a sissy if you even talked about fuel efficiency. Yes - oil in 1998 was close to $10 a barrel, and it never looked like it would touch even $20, let alone $140, as it did this summer in 2008. So you had Ford come out with an SUV named Excursion in 1999, which was much, much bigger than the Ford Expedition, which in turn was much bigger than the Ford Explorer, which itself was much bigger than any car you would reasonably expect to need. This behemoth weighed more than 8500 pounds, and even though Ford did not have to specify fuel economy for the monster, it gave no more than 10 miles to a gallon - about 4kms to a liter. When gas prices started to rise, well, guess what - these cars were simply too costly to run. Even with thousands of dollars in rebates, Ford just could not get them moving. Production finally stopped in 2005. The same story was to be repeated when Toyota and Honda started to work on making hybrid and electric cars; Detroit's response was one of denial, ignorance, arrogance. Till oil hit $100 a barrel, and then $110, $120, and more. Even though oil is today back to $60, people recognize that it is more because of the slowing economy and the global financial crisis. Once the US and world economy picks up, so will demand, and countries like India and China, ever hungry for oil to fuel their industries and factories, will likely push prices of oil to near $200. At that price, one can well imagine that most of the world's cars will be uneconomical.

Thirdly, it has been documented, but not received as much publicity as one would have liked. The US auto industry paid local governments to dismantle city rail transport networks so that people would have no choice but to buy cars. It worked - there is more than one car per person, man, woman, and child, in the US today. In other words, there are more cars than people in the country.

A book that covers all these topics and more with authority, depth, and intelligence, would be greatly useful.

Praful Bidwai, the idiot

I have a deep dislike for people who make a career out of disparaging India, its achievements, its heritage, culture, and history. Especially when those people are Indians. It makes you wonder just what is wrong with these people that they hate their own country so deeply. Just how much poison is there that is running in place of blood in their bodies that they make a career out of running down your own country in front of the whole world (it would be equally reprehensible to do it in private also).

Praful Bidwai (Wikipedia), by all indications and his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, seems to be one of those people. Now there are few things more distasteful than actually sitting down and reading his columns, but I actually did that, and here is a sampling of his writings. They go beyond, far beyond the limits of what could be considered as taking a contrarian view, of providing healthy criticism, that is so important in a democracy. His focus is obsessively on those things that can be used to run down India, its achievements, belittle its achievers, be they in the sphere of IT or other spheres of life.

• He claims that the BJP was not a national party because it won less than a third of the seats in Parliament. Nowhere is he willing to accord the same status to the Congress, which also won less than a third of the seats in parliament in the 2004 general elections.
• At the drop of a hat he labels the Shiv Sena as a fascist party. While I do not have too many problems with that labelling as I think the Shiv Sena is a ridiculous party of basically chauvinist good-for-nothings, what I would love to see this champion of India to the Muslim League a fascist party. Or such bigots as Banatwalla as traitors. Not a chance.
• When historical , literary, and basic archaelogical evidence pointed out to the existence of a temple under the Babri Masjid, the likes of Praful Bidwai were quick to whitewash such evidence as fabrications of a lunatic right-wing. When surveys ordered by the Supreme Court turned up conclusive evidence of the existence of a temple where the Babri Masjid had existed, he labelled the exercise as 'voodoo archaelogy'. Talk about name calling out of spite. Classic communist propoganda: when you can't fight facts, malign the person and everyone who associates with the person or the facts. Actually, Goebbels (link to Wikipedia) perfected the art of propaganda, and the communists in India seemingly take him to be their idol.
• It is a well known and documented fact that West Bengal is a state that encourages and witnesses huge illegal immigration from Bangaldesh. Most of the times it is with the active connivance and even participation of the communist parties' rank and file cardre. This has serious implications for the national security of India. I would love to hear Bidwai condemn the Left government in West Bengal (after all, haven't they been ruling the state for decades?) in much the same words he condemned the Maharashtra government when it tried to deport a few dozen illegal Bangladeshis from its state.
• He had a ton of hatred for the BJP and Hindutva and the Gujarat riots. The Gujarat riots were shameful on two counts: the fact that a crime of such horrific proportions as the burning of innocent women and children at Godhra could happen, and the fact that the riots that broke out after that. Interesting... Did he have anything similar to say when Hindus were hacked to death in Kerala in a calculated move by some people to instigate communal riots in the state? Or when the Congress party and its beloved leader, Rajiv Gandhi, oversaw the systematic murder of thousands of Sikhs in the country? Or the fact that every politician associated with that act of inhumanity got rewarded by ministerial posts in the Congress government for years to come? Does he even bother to remember the now infamous phrase that went something like 'when a tree falls...'?
• When Bidwai talks about the 'detoxification' of the educational institutions, does he care to comment on the venality and corruption of communist historians like Irfan Habib (who acted as the PhD guide for a student who copied, word for word, the work of another historian and passed it on as his own), Romila Thapar (who can't read a word of Sanskrit yet acts as an expert on ancient Indian history), Panicker (who took lakhs and lakhs of money for research that he never conducted or submitted to the government), and more. All of these historians have over decades, implanted them inside all government supported educational and cultural institutions, propped each other up to create a clique, took money from the government for research they never conducted, outputted work of egregious quality, and yet trumpet themselves as 'historians'.
• It speaks immensely of Bidwai's abilities or lack of them in judging character that he praised Natwar Singh as a man with strong non-aligned perspectives. Hmm.. the only thing he was non-aligned was on where he took money from. Remember the oil for money scam where he proclaimed indgnantly that he N-E-V-E-R took money? Maybe Bidwai and his ilk's motto seems to be, 'theives of the world unite!'
• He stated that Arafat had 'never been an obstacle to peace, rather a precondition for it'. Hmm... does anyone remember that when Israelis offered the Palestinians 94% of the land that they had demanded and compensation for the rest, Arafat had rejected it with enough venom and idiocy to rival Bidwai himself. And that almost every commentator the world over had started stating that Arafat had become the biggest towards peace in the region. Not to mention that Arafat was also accused of embezzling funds that his organization received as donations towards the 'Intifada', and Arafat's personal fortune was estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. So much for Bidwai's acuity of perception.
• Bidwai's manic delusions reach epic proportions when he claims that the the Left has made 'historic contributions to building institutions and values that even the liberals cherish...'. Hmm... venality, corruption, fascination with everything un-Indian, collaboration with the British against the Congress during the freedom movement, calling Subhash Chandra Bose as the 'running dog of the imperialists', calling Mahatma Gandhi as the 'worst force in Indian politics today', taking money from the Soviets during the socialist era... Yes, these are historical contributions, but not quite the same kind as Bidwai would like to remember them as.

Finally, one may say that the treachery of the communists does in no way lessen the crime of others. True, very true. And I am all for punishing all those who cheat and steal from India. And every single thief punished is a thief reduced from society. In that spirit, can we start with detoxifying India of communists? That will be like eliminating in one fell swoop the biggest cancer that has afflicted India for decades now. Then go on to such creatures as Deve Gowda, Mayawati, Laloo Prasad, Mayawati, Sonia Gandhi, Shiv Sena, and all those Congress and BJP MPs that took money to pose questions in Parliament? It may mean sending to prison almost all our elected MPs and MLAs, but it would be a start... Then there are the esteemed IAS, IPS, IFS, IRS, and other equally distinguished bureaucrats. Tens of thousands of such people would need to be sent for the rest of their natural lives to prison for the tens of thousands of crore rupees that this breed has siphoned away for decades.

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© 2006, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved. Reposted to this blog, Oct 2011.

I am underpaid

Cognitive dissonance...
Looking at Infosys' FY 05 annual report confirmed what I had been suspecting for many months now - I am severly, grossly, underpaid. I must really like my work (which I do... so what am I complaining about)

© 2006, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved. Reposted to this blog, Oct 2011

How Not To Abbreviate

Given that it's the Times of India, I am not surprised that this is the abbreviation it came up with for Computer Associates - Computer Ass!!

This is a 2004 story, and the screenshot had been on my hard disk a really long time...

© 2006, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved. Re-posted to this blog, Aug 2013.

Bangalore Crumbling - 2

I have been posting about Bangalore and its crumbling infrastructure for some time now on this blog. And I have focused on Bannerghatta Road, by far the worst road in Bangalore, and now holder of the dubious distinction of having been voted as the worst road in India on NDTV.



This photo is of the start of the 'public private' partnership road, that was asphalted, 4-laned, not 6 months back.

A teeny weeny bit of rain and there you have it - the state of the road is there for all to see.


To be honest this is not strictly Bannerghatta Road, but a service road that runs parallel to it. I use the word 'road' only in the loosest of terms, as I don't quite have an adjective to describe what I shot here.


Bangalore civic authorities have a ready solution for the road degradation... simply cover it up with stones and mud and hope it doesn't rain.


I wonder if the government realizes the farcical humour in this sign... 9 crores is not a small sum, except for govt babus and politicians. 9 crores could have constructed an equal length of a national highway quality road. But only in Bangalore - it wasn't enough to asphalt a four lane stretch that could last even half a monsoon.


Property developers still try and market properties in and around JP Nagar's 9th phase as 'elite' and equivalent to living in a developed country. Talk about intense cognitive dissonance!


It's amazing how just one junction on Bannerghatta Road can yield such a rich treasure of corruption and incompetence.


This takes the cake - these stones have been here for the better part of the year, and the road itself has been closed off to traffic for some two and a half years.

 © 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Bangalore crumbling - 2

Pavement on Bannerghatta Road.

The apartment complex to the right of this photo is Adarsh Vihar, on Bannerghatta Road.

© 2005, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved. Reposted to this blog 2011