TTP claims Osama still alive

TTP claims Osama still alive

increase retirement age of PSU employees to sixty four

For a nation to progress I had suggested in 2005 at a forum in Hotel Taj Palace New Delhi that communications should be made free. See where the country is today just behind China but nearly catching up. At least today mobile phones services have become so affordable that even a maid is having a mobile in India.

To make my point count PSU's are not getting quality people for the blue collar jobs that people have to do in a company like SAIL. The newer work force available these days not only wants free lap tops and mobiles on joining the company, but also want white collar jobs, work out of an office and shun site work which is very much the requirement / nature of work if quality steel has to be produced competitively.

Increase in retirement age from 60 to 62 was proposed by the ministry in 2008, but put down by some one inexperienced not so young unmarried at 40 having ancestral powers to do so, posing to be the leader of the young brigade .

But today the situation is changed and requires retirement age to be 64 for obvious reasons. So much so that for a mammoth PSU like SAIL to survive, whose Maharatna status is at stake more so by 2015 when capitalisation of the expansion projects taken up by SAIL takes place is the need of the hour. Really experienced employees are required right now to run the show starting at march 2011.

This is how correction not done at the right time makes companies like Lehman Brothers, Merryl Lunch, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Hundai etc., the list is endless have become bankrupt.

corruption index for india way below pakistan

Hi All,

Taking a cue from Gautu's missive, I came across this interesting data regarding the corruption index of various countries. I expected to see India among the top ten. But guess what? I had difficulty in locating it, as it was ranked way down at #47( Pakistan is #37). Have a look at the table below (for more details and other interesting statistics, visit http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/gov_cor )

Though I was initially surprised at this welcome demotion of India, on second thoughts, it occurred to me that corruption had in fact reduced dramatically in the last ten years, in my day to day experiences with the government. Some examples:

  a.. getting a phone connection doesn’t need a smarty politico as a friend and / or done.

  b..  No permit to buy a car

  c.. no influence required to get a gas connection

  d.. or a Bajaj scooter

  e.. no manufacturing licence for almost anything

  f.. no import licence for ditto

  g.. No influence to get an air booking

  h.. Almost unlimited foreign exchange for travel overseas

  i.. I can walk through the green channel on return without fear I am sure you can add to this list.

I am sure things should get even better in the next few years.

Rgds,

Tilly

Map & Graph: Government: Corruption

       Scroll down for more information Show map full screen

     Country Description

     Definition: Relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people, academics and risk analysts, and ranges between 0 (highly clean) and 10 (highly corrupt). Includes police corruption, business corruption, political corruption, etc. Data for 2003.

     Amount

      1. Bangladesh 8.7

      2. Nigeria 8.6

      3. Haiti 8.5

      4. Burma 8.4

      5. Paraguay 8.4

      6. Azerbaijan 8.2

      7. Cameroon 8.2

      8. Tajikistan 8.2

      9. Angola 8.2

      10. Georgia 8.2

      11. Indonesia 8.1

      12. Kenya 8.1

      13. Papua New Guinea 7.9

      14. Kyrgyzstan 7.9

      15. Libya 7.9

      16. Iraq 7.8

      17. Congo, Republic of the 7.8

      18. Ecuador 7.8

      19. Sierra Leone 7.8

      20. Uganda 7.8

food for thought, india ceo forum attended by me in 2005

THE INDIA CEO FORUM

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING: Politics & Economy

July 27, 2005

The Common Minimum Programme? The Edifice of a Lost Opportunity A blunder gravely detrimental to national interest that any Government can commit would be to believe in its own propaganda. The UPA government, mostly, and the National Advisory Council, at all times, believe that the mandate to govern is along terms of references carefully encapsulated in the Common Minimum Programme (CMP). This is a fallacy.

The Congress Party with its inconsistent allies formed a government along through a wobbly coalition called the United Progressive Alliance. The coalition sought support from powerful communist parties and together they agreed on a certain course articulated in a 24-page document. The CMP lays down the guidelines that continue to dictate the policy formulation process in areas as inconspicuous as a sale of some token equity in a government-owned company, to more considerable issues such as the extent of strategic partnerships with global powers like the United States. To seek communist support, the Congress bit the bait, gave in too much and made silly commitments to huge spends in social welfare programmes. Nobody seemed to have questioned then as to where the money was going to come from and even knowledgeable economists seemed to have forgotten that India runs a serious fiscal deficit and a large national dis-saving. The hurry to cobble together a government seemed more imperative than economic logic or, crucially, long term national interest.

Government officials and politicians must make up their minds as to the premise on which they intend to determine the country?s destiny. It’s really a matter of making simple choices.

In the first instance there is the free market way to go, something that was introduced in 1991 when Dr Manmohan Singh was Finance Minister and subsequently reinforced in fits and starts by the BJP led government that followed. The second option is government financed development, a concept hammered away at for four decades. Most observers of the economy would concede that successive governments in the 1960s through to the 1980s tried this tack and failed miserably. It was such failure that motivated the first option which subscribes to the hypothesis of less government intervention and allows the free markets to take their own course. The simple premise is that if the economy grows, jobs and hence national wealth would be created automatically.

The people of India never voted for the CMP as the Congress now seems to mistakenly interpret. They voted for better governance. The BJP lost its claim to power when its allies mis-performed (AIDMK in Tamil Nadu; Telegu Desam in Andhra) and the party itself lost some of its charm in those states where it professed a natural advantage. People in India altered their previous voting patterns after BJP mismanaged Gujarat and its Central ministers changed its character, became arrogant and sometimes corrupt. For the Congress to think it has a solemn duty solely to “protect the poor” at the cost of national growth is shortsighted.

Several decades of Congress Governments subscribed to the “alleviate poverty slogan” and to policies which held India back. Other Asian countries that opened their economies, privatised and offered better governance made rapid strides. Many of these are no longer branded as “Third-World”. Despite the dreams of an emerging super-power, India remains entrenched precisely in those clutches.

I M A

The Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has served his entire career in government. He understands, better than anyone, those policies that are possible for implementation and those that are a sheer waste of precious resource. Sadly, others in the National Advisory Council, staffed largely by left-thinking NGOs do not know better. What they want will take India back to the thresholds of socialism through retrograde and failed policies. Sadly, Dr Singh seems to find it hard to convince his political masters within the Congress Party.

The CMP is nothing more than propaganda created for political compromise. It cannot become the biblical reference that directs the governance of a country. The pressure of the communists amounts to blackmail where a minute section of the political community temporarily blessed with disproportionate power is exercising it to the hilt, much to the detriment of our country and to its long term opportunity. Surely, it is time that the Congress leadership recognises this. The so-called ideologues of the Left that continue to subscribe to failed paradigms are few in number but clearly powerful. All their socialist beliefs seem right for application at the federal level where they can experiment. But in West Bengal, a province they govern, a well grounded and practical Chief Minister continues to make corrective decisions seeking to reverse the outflow of investment, forced upon the region by decades of bad policies and misrule.

The CMP was not the basis of winning elections. Indeed, the Congress technically does not in itself have the mandate of the people. 146 seats in parliament cannot qualify for that privilege. The Left, ideologically apart in every respect, has a lesser claim. Coming together does not give them any more legitimacy. It is quite wrong for the Congress to be continuously bullied by the Left, just as it is wrong for the Left to differentiate in policies they choose to adopt in West Bengal versus the rest of the nation. If they feel that the development of Bengal is important enough to shed some of their dated beliefs, then surely they should feel the same, for the country at large.

It seems so very unfair that India has to compromise on its growth potential. Dr Singh possibly realises this but is unable to do very much. Several of his peers in the Party mistakenly believe that government controls and even badly directly government spending are essential for winning votes and in a way actually reinforce the communist position. They believe in their own propaganda and thrust it upon others as a sacred document called the CMP. Now is that not a blunder?

steve jobs has no time left dated 23rd february 2011

This is the text of the Commencement address at Stanford Convocation by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night

asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"

They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved then.

It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.

Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -  your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.

Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love.

And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked

myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No"

for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share.

No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.

It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

its a doga life after all

A butcher watching over his shop is really surprised when he sees a dog

coming inside the shop. He shoos him away. But later, the dog is back again.

So, he goes over to the dog and notices it has a note in its mouth. He takes

the note and it reads "Can I have 12 sausages and a leg of lamb, please".

The dog has money in its mouth, as well. The butcher looks inside and, lo

and behold, there is a ten dollar note there. So he takes the money and puts

the sausages and lamb in a bag, placing it in the dog's mouth.

The butcher is so impressed, and since it's about closing time, he decides

to shut the shop and follow the dog. So off he goes. The dog is walking down

the street, when it comes to a level crossing; the dog puts down the bag,

jumps up and presses the button. Then it waits patiently, bag in mouth, for

the lights to turn. They do, and it walks across the road, with the butcher

following him all the way.

The dog then comes to a bus stop, and starts looking at the timetable. The

butcher is in awe as the dog stops a bus by pulling its left leg up and gets

in it.

The butcher follows the dog into the bus. Then the dog shows a ticket which

is tied to its belt to the bus conductor. The butcher is nearly fainting at

this sight, so are the other passengers in the bus. The dog then sits near

the driver's seat looking outside waiting for the bus stop to come. As soon

as the stop is in sight, the dog stands and wags its tail to inform the

conductor. Then, without waiting for the bus to stop completely, it jumps

out of the bus and runs to a house very close to the stop. It opens the big

Iron Gate and rushes inside towards the door.

As it approaches the wooden door, the dog suddenly changes its mind and

heads towards the garden. It goes to the window, and beats its head against

it several times, walks back, jumps off, and waits at the door. The butcher

watches as a big guy opens the door, and starts abusing the dog, kicking him

and punching him, and swearing at him.

The butcher surprised with this, runs up, and stops the guy. "What in

heaven's name are you doing? The dog is a genius. He could be on TV, for the

life of me!", to which the guy responds: "You call this clever? This is the

second time this week that this stupid dog's forgotten his key."

Moral of the story:

You may continue to exceed onlooker's expectations but shall always fall

short of the boss' expectations. It's dog's life after all.........