De Dana Dan Review

De Dana Dan is a pathetic movie with no story and little comedy. Very boring. Don't watch it.
It is the most stereotype comedy and before interval , all that happens is the preparation for a comedy background. All Priyadarshan wants us to do is keep track of mistaken identities and the room numbers that they have to put up in a hotel in the movie. There are very few scenes of the trio of Akshay, Sunil and Paresh Rawal together. Akshay is locked out of action for one hour in the movie.
It is a complete waste of time and money. Sit somewhere with friends and chat. That will have much more humor.

Terminator Salvation Review

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is my favorite movie. The third part -- Rise of the Machines was a bad sequel which an ardent follower like me also didn't like. Arnold had become old and it was sad to know that Judgement Day did come. That is why Terminator Salvation was important. Christian Bale carries the legacy of John Connor ahead. I would have loved to see what happens after Judgement Day to Connor. What we get is a Connor who is hailed as the Prophet of the Resistance against Skynet. How the young teen changed into the fighting machine is not shown at all?

The lack of detail is appalling in other places too. Sam Worthington's character Marcus -- a test robot made by Cybernet is great. But I must concede that Transformers had better visual effects. That is not the movie's strength. Its core lies in the human vs. machines dialogues -- the ones by Kyle Reece and Connor are strong.

Salvation gives you the feeling that it was made with the intention that there is more to come. The story has to move ahead. I am waiting for the next installment.

Joe Wilcox on IPhone

Websites like TechCrunch, GigaOm offer the latest happenings on the web. But at times, I like in-depth analysis -- the kind provided by Gartner blogs, and independent analysts like those on ZDnet and Joe Wilcox.

I had an e-mail conversation with him about the state of mobile market in India and why the Apple IPhone hasn't emulated its success in North America and Europe here. Some portions of that conversation were quoted by him yesterday in one of his posts in Betanews on the fortune of IPhone.

I am quoting the part where I am quoted:

But iPhone is different. "You cannot [swap] SIM cards," he emphasized, "because it is locked onto [the] operator you bought the device from. An iPhone bought from Airtel will not work on Vodafone and visa versa. Phone is not subsidized as well in India."

The perspective is about the same there in India as viewed from afar by the Gartner analyst. "Apple bungled up big time with the iPhone in India," said Rohit Mishra, a student studying mobile technologies at VIT University in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India. "It still has a solid brand and created the touchscreen crave that has resulted in the success of Nokia [XpressMusic] 5800 and Samsung Star." Nokia is India's market leader, with 56.1 percent unit marketshare in second quarter, according to IDC. Samsung was No. 2 and Apple No. 22.

Rohit continued: "By pricing iPhone at Rs 31,000 ($600 approximately), Apple turned away a huge bunch of people who were waiting for the iPhone. There is another issue here -- we don't have 3G here. It's been launched by the state carrier in select cities, but that doesn't count for much now."

What do you think about the future of smartphones in markets like India? Discuss it with me here or on Twitter -- movingahead

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