Need for English

If you have not seen TED talks, you are missing one of the best resources that the web gives you. Its just brilliant.

This TED talk by Jay Walker explores the worldwide mania for English. Walker has got it completely right. In India's remotest villages, the concept of English being a tool to success is crystal clear. Although localization is itself important, there si no doubt that the language of global business and problem-solving is now English. I sincerely hope that like China, we are able to evolve a consensus where every child has a right to quality English education.

Figuring out the health labyrinth

Two things figured prominently in all the recession articles that I read -- the housing bust and the steep health care costs. Health care is a prime necessity -- starts right at the birth, even before it - and I wondered how something so basic could become one of the causes of the whole economy cracking up.

Today I came across a great post on the New Yorker where the author Atul Gawande investigates in depth what is actually making this necessity service so capital-intensive. Atul takes the example of the city of McAllen in Texas where the average outgo per Medicare expense per person is a whopping USD 15,000. [INR 750,000]

Atul makes great observations about the reasons behind this scenario which I am commenting on in the Indian context. India faces a very uphill task in building its health care system which to say the very least is in complete shambles. As we might think, the problem is not only in the rural areas. Barring a few exceptions, no government hospital attracts the confidence of middle-class India. The rut that characterizes most of the Indian government sector is most evident in the hospitals and district health centers. The options for the people who are not able to subscribe to medical insurance are depressingly limited. The big-wig private names may be huge commercial successes but their steep costs in Indian context make any treatment in these places a very tough decision. Add to it, the recent Wockhardt incident shows how high-handed these high quality centers can be.




Being the entrepreneurial hard core fan, I always thought that widespread private participation is a potential cure for this problem. But after reading Atul's post, I am a bit shaken in my views.

He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care.

For the first instance, I am seeing entrepreneurship as a negative aspect. He sees doctors intention to maximize revenue by conducting more and more tests - many a times in facilities where they have an ownership stake. Down here, no one even notices this -- it is so common. If not, then why doctors insist that we get tested from some particular facility itself? I will another dimension to it. I have noticed that many times even the medicines that the doctors prescribe are only available at certain recommended stores. Doctors' dependence on the quantity of referrals skews up the system badly.




The only thing that inspires hope is the concept adopted by The Mayo Clinic I only knew Mayo Clinic as the health source often cited by Reader's Digest. What I didn't know is that Mayo is famous for its low-cost, tech-intensive and high quality health care. Mayo has fixed salaries for its doctors so there is no reason to bruce up quantity.

Atul also presents a wonderful metaphor on the need of an integrated approach towards medical-care.

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

Rather than trying to catch up with specialists individually who treat all our medical issues in isolation, we should have an integrated approach towards medical care. I don't see how the multiple levels between a physician and the specialist helps anyone.



There is also one big bottleneck in the Indian system. There is just not enough admission seats for medical aspirants. Government colleges have very few seats and the private colleges are content with their existing capacities. They might be making enough dough from the millions of capitation fee that they collect every year, but it is of no use when the money is not used to open new medical colleges and facilities. The sheer desperation that the medical aspirants face with their rejection is steadily reducing the number of medical aspirants For a country which hugely lacks doctors, this is pure hara-kiri. This issue can only be resolved if our well-to-do business sector goes on and creates strong medical institutions not-for-profit.

Wockhardt Hospital Front by Flickr/Wockhardt Hospitals
Ladakh Medical Center by Flickr/avalochi

Firefox in times of Chrome and Safari

Mozilla Firefox has had a roller-coaster ride in the past couple of years. From being the symbol of geeks a couple of years back, it has now come to represent a old, sluggish warlord. There was a time when if someone didn't use Firefox, we would scoff at them (Opera users, the very rare ones that one met were spared.)
In those years, Opera seemed a good competitor. I leaned more towards Opera attracted by its fast speed. But as the open-source movement hit me hard, Firefox grew big. In those years, Google backed Firefox strongly. Firefox was the browser in Google's very famous Google Pack of software. As Internet Explorer kept lagging behind on features (they didn't had tabbed browsing for God's sake) and failing massively in security tests, Firefox was just everywhere.
Firefox users love the huge extensions and add-ons that the open-source browser comes with. The Firefox add-ons site is still the poster-boy of open-source world. But then things changed. Apple Safari came for Windows in 2007 and Google came up with its own web browser - Chrome in 2008. I still wonder what magic potion Apple has. God!!! The web looks so beautiful on the Safari. If ever I can understand how.

Recently Google was in news for the way design elements have been alienated by the search major. I am not a great fan of Google's design but if ever they will get the design right, they got it with Chrome. Chrome just revolutionized browser-design. The minimalist look with the integrated search and address bar and the 'most-visited' start page is brilliant. Chrome also made each tab a separate process taking browser-stability to a new level.

On the other hand, the same Firefox has lost all traces of stability. The past few months have been tough on Firefox with my browser crashing too many times. I have a tendency to keep many tabs open and that doesn't help at all. There was a difference of 6 days between versions 3.0.9 and 3.0.10!! Firefox usually comes out with an upgrade every month. 6 days just shows you the mess within.


I am not a web-developer and the few friends who are now swear by Chrome. So what keeps the clock ticking? I think its the add-ons and extensions. That keeps growing. Some of the extensions like Delicious, Ghostery, Power Twitter, Tree Style Tabs are just marvelous. Mozilla Labs have come out with some great add-ons themselves lately. Ubiquity - a command based UI , Personas - easy skin manager and Prism -- to make web applications run independently are the Mozilla add-ons that run on my machine now. It won't be far before these start being available on Chrome too. To survive beyond that point, Mozilla needs to do one thing well -- get good, fast browsing back.

I shifted to the 3.5 Beta 4 Firefox version today. Among other things, it allows in-tab private browsing. But the more important thing now is that it is faster -- much more than the public 3.0.11 Thats important for Firefox's survival.

Tuition Mania

So what you and I always knew has now been verified by the Assocham -- the Indian industry association. Private Tuition is rampant and costly all over the country. The Assocham report says :

"Private tuitions have witnessed a steep increase of about 40-45 per cent in the last few years as middle class parents have been spending nearly one-third of their monthly incomes on them."

The problem with tuition is that it makes you dependent. Its like a cigarette -- once you have started with it, you think you can't do without it.
So people go on from having tuition at school, then tuition for IIT and even then for IIM. The problem is that it undermines your regular education (though that itself is a farce Now parents are spending one-third of their incomes on these private tutors. Whats wrong folks!! Go and look for some creative thing for your child. Mugging up that chemistry table or that physics equation won't make him/her the next Einstein. If you really care so much about your child, work hard and break up from this self-supporting myth of tuition.
There is a lot that can be learnt today. More than your money-sucker tutor can ever teach.

Photo courtesy blurasis

Moving Ahead from Turbo C

Ankur Sethi has done a brilliant blog post on the differences between compiler, C++, Turbo C, IDE (and if you are sane enough to be interested) GCC and Dev C++. Ankur has explained all of it very clearly, so I won't reinvent the wheel. I strongly recommend that you go through his post.

A couple of weeks back, I was talking with my Programming Fundamentals teacher here at VIT about the possibility of completely migrating to Dev C++ at least or dump our Windows 2000 systems in favor of Red Hat/Open Suse running GCC. This will really help in fostering a climate of open-source in the college. For God's sake, Turbo C was developed in 1992 and is completely out of sync with the new standards of C/C++. Other schools might need to use some proprietary software but computing sciences can surely take the first step.

The Story Behind Neoforma.com

Browsing through the "World Trade" section of VIT library, I was looking for C.K.Prahalad's famous "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". To my despair, someone had misplaced that book. Disappointed, I glanced over the adjacent Entrepreneurship section - a permanent favorite. I found "Starting Something" by Wayne McVicker-- a strange name. I thought it will be a 'how-to' book on starting a company. It turned out to be a biography of the founder of a Silicon Valley 'dotcom' company -- Neoforma.com I had read a lot about dotcom companies and their bust, so I picked it up to know something more about it.

As I started reading it, one thing instantly became clear. This book was not about Wayne McVicker; it was about Neoforma.com - a company that he had co-founded with his friend Jeff. The book showed how two people passionate about a business opportunity went on to make a company worth $ 3 billion in 4 years battling against the mightiest Venture Capital firm -- Kliener Perkins. Starting Something has all characters -- good, bad and nasty, but all of them come across as very real. It gives us an unflinching look into both the drak and bright sides of corporate culture -- where dreams are fulfilled and the best of friendships are broken. Denis Coleman -- founder of Symantec Corporation (the makers of the very popular Norton Antivirus sums up the book

A must read for aspiring entrepreneurs. It took me years in the trenches building Symantec to learn the people-side lessons so freely elucidated by McVicker - and unfortunately not yet taught in business schools.

-- that is how deep the book goes in exploring the importance of people in the success of a business.

The book is divided into numerous small chapters of 4 to 5 pages generally. That gives fluidity to the story -- the events register their presence, but it becomes clear that no single event can become the center-piece of the narrative.

Wayne McVicker and his friend Jekk Kleck weren't the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- both were in their late thirties with a family to care for. Like most other founder pairs, Wayne and Jeff weren't the best of friends from the outset. But, both strongly believed in the concept of better flow of information to buyers -- in this case hospitals. They wanted to provide all possible information about the large medical equipments as well as numerous small products that occupy hospital rooms. As their belief in the usability and importance of the idea grew with time, they ran into confrontation with their bosses at Varian -- their present company. As Varian resisted, Jeff and Wayne proposed to carve out a spin-off from Varian. Though successful , they were taken aback to see the bickering and hateful corporate environment under which they left the company they had been working for years.

The book moves on to show how Neoforma discovered internet and realized the immense potential of the medium. As the company grew, Wayne explains his dilemma in hiring new people- which continues even as Neoforma transformed into a behemoth. He concludes that the single most important factor is the actual fit between the company and the employee.

Starting Something is not only about the business part of it. As Wayne and his wife Anni put every piece of their asset on mortgage for Neoforma with 2 young children to care for, Wayne describes the emotional tug-of-war he went through while eliminating their complete security putting their entire lives on the fate of Neoforma.

The book is also about people -- from Jack (their warm attorney) to Wally and Shawn (their angel investors) To Alexander, JP and Bret (their VCs) Wayne explicitly highlights his ambivalence about venture capitalists -- the people who care only about one single thing - making money and making it fast.

Throughout the book, Wayne never makes an attempt to cover-up his emotions. How he felt uncomfortable from being a founder to donning the role of an investor in the company that he had made himself. He also discusses his insecurity as Neoforma changes from CDROMs to a complex website - a technology he was unfamiliar with.

The book's richness comes from the part where Wayne analyzes his own actions - why he pursued a particular deal, why he was adamant to hire a particular man to why he considered himself completely unsuitable in running Neoforma in the long run.

You will fell that the narrative becomes similar to a movie as the nook proceeds -- not flashy in t he same way but with similar ulterior motives and huge drama at play.

After a successful IPO and a severe crash in share prices, Wayne realized that Neoforma had outgrown him. He moves on to found Attania -- but not with the same intensity as Neoforma. That intensity is now for his family.

Overall a higly recommended read. You will love the truth and reality of the story.

Locking us in -- Present Sir!!

Photo courtesy orange42 through Flickr
Teachers have been a great part of my life -- often encouraging, loving and caring throughout my school life. They really made you want to come to school. You felt good, right!!

But coming to college, I have seen the other side of teachers. For me college was supposed to be "freedom". But even in India where we pride ourselves for our democratic freedom, the word "freedom" has been made to carry negative annotations in our colleges.

Apart from the ultra-conservative practice of keeping boys and girls as separated as possible and locking us inside our hostel blocks at 9, the biggest restriction is the minimum attendance requirement of 75%. The biggest pain in my life now is the compulsion to go & waste my 5 hours in class everyday. Waste because I neither like nor understand most of the things that are taught in classes. (And I am not alone. Go to any class and you will find most in a state of delusion -- chatting, messaging, aimlessly taking down notes and gazing at their watches or cell phones to keep tracking how much more they have to take for the day. There will always be some who are listening very attentively -- why they would even listen attentively to Bush talking about world peace. Thankfully, there are some classes which are good, but generally classes are a pain.


I wanted to go deeper and find some sense in this madness. Why colleges need a minimum attendance? Colleges provide us degrees after testing us on a minimum set of requirements -- subjects and syllabus that they agree upon. For passing these subjects, why do they make attending classes necessary? Let the student do what he wants to -- go to library, sit in lab or just play Counter-Strike in his room. The best thing will be that the college accepts the work that students want to do. All but a very few have some interest which they want to pursue, but drop because it will hurt their GPA. About attending classes -- if I like the subject and if the teacher is good, I will attend the class. Otherwise, I will bunk it.

The college should be cool with it. The whole world is moving to a more personalized approach in life -- and thats the way it should be with teaching too. College shouldn't only be restricted to attending 'x' number of classes for 'y' number of days. I should have complete autonomy on choosing what I want to learn and how I want to go about it.

Colleges and teachers must be brave enough to take this leap of faith. They may face only very few students in a classroom but at least all of them are there with a passion to learn. Let others choose or pursue their own passion. Ultimately, the aim is to help everyone achieve his/her best. Minimum restrictions will only help everyone do their best. The fear of misuse is present and is also valid, but smart techniques can easily correct most of them.

Start with something simple. Instead of giving assignments, where people just print-out the corresponding Wikipedia page or worse print and copy the content.A free way is the best and fastest approach to your destination, ain't it?