If you want to make new friends, there is no use in just saying hi to people, something of value should be exchanged or there should be a common activity. That’s when they become friends. Real friends.

I’ve added a page on my wiki to list the type of common activities possible in India right from cycling to movie appreciation. Let me know if I can add more variety to the given mix of activities. I’m interested in figuring out what activities do people take up.

I finally had to give away my old Suzuki Samurai bike. It was a 1999 model, which makes it 9 years old.

I used to call it ‘The Last Samurai’ because it is one of the few Samurai bikes that I could see on the roads.

Sigh. It feels like I’m giving away so many memories.

Now that I have to move on to a new mode of transport, I’ve been looking at the various alternatives:

• I’ve become a big fan of city metros ever since my visits to Singapore and Delhi, but Namma Metro is scheduled to be completed only by 2011.
• Local buses are a good option. For example, it took me just 16 rupees to travel more than 10 km. And it was far more convenient than inquiring 5-6 auto rickshaws before getting one auto-wala guy to agree to take you to your destination.
  • However, the biggest problem is finding out which bus goes to your destination as well as finding out the timings/frequency of that bus. I had bought one of the 30-rupees “Bangalore Metro Transport Corporation Travel Planner” maps but I still haven’t understood how to use it to take you from Point A to Point B, even though all the points are plotted on it.
• A car is out of the question, because
  1. I can’t afford one (because, uh, I don’t have a salary…)
  2. It just adds to the already-high traffic on the road.
  3. It is not cost-effective – 15 kmpl vs. > 50 kmpl for a motorbike.
• A new good motorcycle still costs upwards of 50,000 rupees. So this is the best option so far.
• But what about an electric scooter?

I took a test drive of the ‘Yo! Speed’ bike and it was pretty decent. It did not have good pickup, and it takes some getting used to the quick movements it does. The positives are that it made no noise, no pollution, has no gears and requires no petrol! You just have to charge it for 6-8 hours at a stretch and it will run for 50 km.

Rediff says YO! Speed is twice as cheap as an equivalent petrol scooter. On the other hand, the manufacturers claim that “YOSpeed runs for 500km in Rs. 50″. I’m not sure which one is more accurate, but it is definitely far cheaper than a petrol two-wheeler.

I’m also looking at vehicles which are a combination of a bicycle and an electric scooter – pedal when you want to, when you’re tired/bored, you can switch from human power to battery power, and it’ll whiz along.

I have been looking at the EVFuture website, and it really looks like electric vehicles are going to be a major wave in the future. I’m surprised there are so many electric scooters in India, including models by Hero Electric and TVS. My understanding is that the business, the technology and the market are yet to mature before it can take on the petrol and diesel two-wheeler industry.

The only question is which ones are viable today? And I’m talking about viability in terms of reliability, quality, service, spare parts, safety, etc.

If there’s one thing that I wish could change in India, I would vote for having a retirement age for politicians.

When there is a concept of retirement for many other careers like engineers, bankers, CEOs, etc. why shouldn’t the same apply for politicians?

If the reason for a retirement age in the private sectors is that the capacity to contribute becomes lesser, the same applies for politics. If the reason is that they should have a relaxed retirement life, the same applies for politics.

If the old people retire, it will give a chance for younger people with fresher perspectives to come in (with the hope that ‘remote control’ possibilities will be minimal), and at the same time the bureaucracy gets refreshed more often with lesser influence by the older people.

Of course, I know it’ll never happen, because the law would have to be passed by the very same people whose careers will be shortened.

The weekend before last, BarCamp Bangalore 7 was held. The session that I was most looking forward to was the ‘cycling to work’ session initiated by Pradeep B V (of MapUnity fame). What made the session interesting was that people were asked to cycle to IIMB and showcase their bicycles in an outdoor session, and encourage others to take up cycling.

The idea by Pradeep to have it in the open area outside the cafeteria just after lunch was a brilliant marketing ploy, because people would just walk out of the cafeteria and then they would see all the cycles and then out of curiosity, they would come closer and end up chatting with the cyclists. It was nice to see people hopping on and going for rides just to check out the cycles.

The stars of the show were undoubtedly Vikram and Varun because of their cycling clothes and their advanced bikes which have features such as special shoes that lock into the pedals as well as ability to unhook the wheels for easy transportation.

We had a lot of fun talking to people and answering many questions from curious Barcampers and turned out to be a successful session. Among the curious people, there was also a reporter from the Bangalore Mirror. It turns out that we ended up in an article in their Sunday edition yesterday:

BANGALORE MIRROR, SEPTEMBER 21, 2008, Page 9 : Rising fuel costs, never-ending traffic jams, have made travelling quite a problem in Bangalore. So it came as no surprise that young techies, who cycle to work, created a stir at Barcamp 7 in IIM last Saturday – Renuka Phadnis

The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore was full of activity last weekend. The auditorium was the venue for an interactive session of Headstart, a group that supports entrepreneurship in the technology sector. In the corridors and break-out spaces of the management school, there were parallel discussion sessions going on of Barcamp 7. But the one group that attracted the most attention here was the one that pedals their way to work. Varun, Vikram and Swaroop, the three directors of Ion Lab, cycle to their workplace.

And when they are stuck in any of Bangalore’s infamous traffic jams, the trio simply lift the bikes and walk out of the jam. Vikram used to cycle to his office in Bosch earlier and is still cycling to his new workplace. He cycles up to 50 km a day and has even pedaled to Mysore. The cycle he uses is a ‘Giant’ that has as an accessory shoes that swivel into the pedals of the cycle.

Varun has been cycling in Bangalore for six months after he got hooked on to it in the US.”A lot of people complain about the traffic but I like it,” he says. Once in a jam, he lifted the cycle and a guy in a car told him, “Dude, I am here stuck in this traffic and you are getting away?” He likes the fact that cycling keeps him fit too.

When you ask Swaroop if he does not find cycling a challenge in Bangalore, he says, -”Cycling isn’t, but driving a car is!” He says it is a lot safer and easier in the city. He has been cycling from Jayanagar to Domlur for the past two years.

… (see the picture for the full article)

Factual errors aside, it is a good article and really encourages non-cyclist skeptics to consider cycling. The other upshot is that the red bicycle you see on the top of the page is mine, so if I ever want to sell it, I just have to say “As featured in the Bangalore Mirror”, heh. And also, this is the first time ‘Ion Lab’ has been mentioned in the press.

Let’s reiterate over the benefits of cycling to work:

1. You do not need a separate time to exercise, because you’re cycling to work. You save one hour everyday.
2. Save on fuel costs, and in turn make the world less reliant on oil fuels.
3. Reach your workplace faster. It’s a myth that cycling is hard and slow and you’ll be late. On an average, I used to motorbike to my (ex-) Yahoo! office in Domlur in 45 minutes, but used to take 30 minutes on cycle.
4. Don’t get stuck in traffic jams. Just lift your cycle and push it along on the sidewalk. (Please do not cycle on the sidewalk, you’ll be annoying pedestrians)
5. A good exercise before you reach your workplace will really pump up the endorphins and put you in a positive mood to get lot of work done throughout the day.
6. And you’ll be a lot healthier!

Convinced yet?

After reading Atanu Dey on India’s Energy Challenge and Vijay Anand on Why the N-Deal is important, I was wondering if there were some interesting things being done in India regarding energy. And sure enough, I came across these:

• Water
  • Balakrishna has created a turbine to generate power from slow moving water, and he has even used sewage water at Medahalli near Yellamallappan lake (near Bangalore) to experiment. On a side note, Balakrishna’s family previously were bonded labourers.
• Wind
  • SasiNarayan has patented a winged vertical axis wind mill that can be put on the roof top of your house.
    

- Solar – Syed Zahed has created a “Solar Home Energy Pack” that combines a MAGH-I woodgas stove, solar lamps and torch lights with rechargeable batteries and a solar panel. It costs just five thousand rupees. The “Good Stove”, as they call it, is declared as open source technology / Creative Commons. And it’s being used in the Himalayas.

– Harish Hande, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, is on a mission of rural electrification using solar home systems. – On a different note, there is encouragement through the Solar Innovation Program and the Cleantech Ventures Program - Pedal – Energy Conservation Mission, Hyderabad has developed a pedal/solar model that can charge mobiles, PDA, laptops, a fan and colour TV. That’s right, you can pedal to become fitter and generate energy at the same time, and it costs just 5000 rupees! Read the poster for details. - Biomass – Just a small note that the Rural Business Hubs initiative in India (a partnership between Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Confederation of Indian Industry and the Panchayat) is encouraging jatropa cultivation and other methods of generating bio-diesel. - Waste – BIOTECH is turning food waste and other organic waste into bio-gas which can be used for cooking and even produce electricity. – SKG Sangha is creating biogas for cooking plus fertiliser from slurry using the ‘Deenbandu’ cow dung based biogas plant. As a woman from Mallipatna says: “We have many benefits from biogas. With wood, our hands used to itch when we cleaned off the soot from the pots, our eyes had tears, our chests were painful and we coughed a lot. We had headaches and we had sight problems. With biogas, all these problems are gone.”

There are even people like S S Sivakumar who convert air to water, because “he was convinced that water, or the absence of it, held the key. Water plays a dominant role in Indian politics and economics. Agriculture, which accounts for 18% of the country’s gross domestic product and which is the livelihood of 60% of the population, depends on the monsoon and most states have long-running disputes with their neighbours over the sharing of river waters”!

Credits: Most of this information is gleaned from Dr. A S Rao’s excellent blog on Indian innovators.

I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time.

Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.

The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.

The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.

The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”

The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”

Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:

1. Gather the right players
2. Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.

He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:

1. Teach the Game
   • When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game – the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
2. Share the macrovision
   • What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
3. Near-term targets.
   • A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
4. Keep score
   • Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
   • In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
   • Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
   • Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
   • Keep changing critical numbers.
   • Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
   • Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
   • Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk – 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
5. Line of sight
   • Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
   • This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
6. Celebrate your victories
   • Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
   • Have a Victory Party
   • The act of recognizing > how you recognize

7. Align everyone’s interests

   • To the victor(s), belong the spoils
   • In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
   • Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
   • How direct is the co-relation?
   • Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
   • American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.

8. When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.

I’m not a cricket buff but the IPL had got even me hooked. Well, at least during dinner. But for people who are crazy about cricket and want to follow ball-by-ball updates and certainly don’t like refreshing horrible-looking websites, then you might find Cricket Nirvana’s CricketCentre interesting:

The best part is that it runs on your desktop.

The good part is the range of functionality – real time ball-by-ball score updates, full scorecards, wagon-wheel and what not statistics, you can throw flowers or tomatoes at the cricketer of your choice and most of all, it pops up a GTalk-style notification for important events like a sixer, four or a batsman gets out!

The bad part is that the look and feel is too kiddish for my taste and the UI needs to be more simplified.

Back to the plus points, my favorite part is the mini-score card mode which will show up on the bottom-right corner of your desktop:

This idea was conceived and (as far as I know) executed entirely by Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Srinivas Annam, Arun Madas and many others in the Adobe Flex team in Bangalore. If this isn’t cool stuff happening in India dev centres, I don’t know what is. And what better way to show off AIR’s capabilities

I know they have had some tough times in convincing cricket websites about this idea, but it’s good to see it finally out.

I thought I would get a damn good sleep in the night because I was so tired. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Not with the snorers around. On top of that, it was so cold and I didn’t have a jacket. I kept tossing and turning all night.

At 4.30 am of Day 2 (June 01 Sunday), I was jolted by a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo sound. Soon enough, our leader Narayan woke us all up. I was surprised to see everybody get up immediately. At around 5.30 am, we all went out in search of sighting some animals. Unfortunately, we were too loud to get to see any animals. Even our footsteps, especially when crushing leaves, were loud enough to alert the sensitive-eared animals. Our guide who was in front saw some bisons but they ran away in lightning speed. I didn’t know they could do that.

We were soon enough on top of another hill and got to see another beautiful view. Heh, I’m such a landscape-voyeur.

And it was funny to see the things we do for poses in photographs.

What was amazing though was we could see islands in the Arabian Sea.

And then Narayana found viper snakes! These are poisonous snakes and one bite could have been fatal for any of us.

For a while now, I was annoyed by the fact that it has been more than a year and a half since my last trek. So when I saw a call for people who want to join a trek in Shimoga in the [Orkut Bangalore

Trekkers
group](http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=63252&tid=5202222619863645450&start=1),
I jumped at the chance.

A few days later on May 30 night (i.e. last weekend as of this writing), I was on a bus to Sagar in Shimoga district with 13 other strangers I had never met before. Thankfully, all it took was a few smiles and laughs and we got along very well. There were people from varying age groups - 18 to 55 although majority were the young IT crowd.

Then the inevitable happened. Bangalore traffic jam. It took 2-2.5 hours just to get out of the city! There are so many bottlenecks especially near the Jalahalli cross. No wonder the bus drivers are so stressed out. God save us all, I wonder how much worse it can get. Because of all this hungama, we reached Sagar more than a couple of hours late which threw our trekking plans haywire. We had to ditch the idea of trekking till the Belli Gundi waterfall and do a shorter exploration of the area.

To start the day (May 31 Saturday), we got into an open jeep to transport us to Kattinakaru. We had a fun ride through the scenic locale. We even saw the Linganmakki dam from far.

Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup City event. It was intended as a showcase of startups as well as for learning/sharing/mentoring.

I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:

• Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones for startups”
  • India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
    • High energy
    • Lots of growth
    • Small absolute number (relatively)
    • Little infrastructure or process
    • Lack of talent
    • Lots of optimism
    • Need to innovate to survive
    • ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
  • Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
    • Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
      • We can in turn get bangalored and some other country will benefit.
    • Creative folks will thrive.
    • ⇒ We have no choice.
  • Hardest evolutionary steps
    • Those that requires behavior change
      • For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
      • Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
  • Put in place metrics to measure everything – will help identify whether one has already hit an inflection point.
  • Rules of thumb
    1. Focus on customer/issue
    2. Focus on continuous improvement
    3. Intellectual honesty
    4. Results matter – only for MEASURING (measure progress on a larger scale)
    5. ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company