Skilled waiter and his Post Graduate degree #Faces

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While indulging in some sinfully good brew at Murphy`s Brewpub, Bangalore (btw they have good Wit Beer) I encountered Abhishek, the waiter who waited on us. After making conversation with him, I discovered his intensity and knowledge of learning which intrigued me to understand him better.

Hailing from Balia, Uttar Pradesh, this 30 year old is a married man with a two year old. Abhishek speaks fluent English and can strike up a conversation about Bangalore all the way upto beer. He firmly emphasizes that he only serves beer and never drinks. Abhishek tells me that he has been working as a waiter in Bangalore for almost 6 years and holds a postgraduate degree in Hindi. He has taught in a college in the remote part of UP before moving to Bangalore.

He mentions that 26th is his last working day at Murphy`s after which he is moving back home and is fairly concerned about the summer heat this year. Although, he is so looking forward to spending quality time with his family. Abhishek is returning home to hopefully pursue his studies and some day obtain a PHD in Hindi. He dreams of securing his PHD from Banaras Hindu University and is hopeful of getting a scholarship to continue his studies.

I was inspired and happy to witness the dedication and enthusiasm of this young man. Finishing my beer, I left the pub after embracing him and wishing him good luck all the while pondering on how awesome we all can be if we wished that for ourselves. Almost immediately I realized that Abhishek is a post graduate & I just a graduate.

That One Productive Weekend Discovery!!

weekend fun

Last weekend Archit,Krishna and I proposed to do lunch. Our plan was elementary or so we thought – an adequate south Indian meal to fill us up and spend ample amount of time talking about technology/life/etc to catch up. Plans never go in the direction you want especially on weekends is what I’ve learnt.  It so happened that for first time since I’ve moved to Bangalore, I gorged on so much food & that too a satiating north/south Indian meal in just one sitting!  I outdone myself!!! Make no mistake, I ain’t complaining, it was relishing to the core. After appeasing our ravenous appetites, we headed over to Krishna`s house and what occurs next is entertaining. Picture this, three vocally loud people singing vociferously, well actually making a lot of noise and yes I also got to know that both these guys are superb guitar players.

What did we do next? Ahh, we ended up shrill singing till decibels humans are not supposed to hit and touched notes we never knew existed in song [btw yours truly is a bathroom singer, so the experience paid off] Our genre was mainly oldies & recent hindi tracks, actually we just sang like stars. And if that was not enough, Krishna got us into warbling this last songl  “Washing Powder Nirma”  title track that we’ve grown up humming too.

Disclaimer : This is what we made:

and in no way is this to be copied or exposed without consent. If you do so, do at your own risk and don’t say we did not warn you!

If you are unfamiliar with the original track (makes me feel so old now to reference the original, can’t believe that there are so many of you who haven’t heard the original) Washing Powder Nirma – Original

I am open to compliments or criticisms you may have for us! We appreciate you taking that precious time to feedback our talent.

I personally felt good about it, why?

  1. It was so relaxing, I felt happy and we just laughed.
  2. They say, indulging in these kind of spontaneous activities increases  bonding/relationship.Bonus!
  3. For a change you just let go adultism and forget about negative thoughts that always encircles in your mind.

Irrespectively, I felt amazing!

So what next?
We have decided to meet up every week and do the same. Maybe vlog it next time and who knows we might end up having our own channel on youtube/soundcloud for you guys to enjoy!.

Startup Idea, What seriously?
Well I must confess, I beat you to it. I was kinda wondering, how cool will it be to have this sort of jam organized once in month where startup folks can join/participate. It will make one happy and for a change they will not have to worry about startup term sheet, VC funding, board meeting and the rest of that crazy stuff.

What do you people think?
I would love to hear back from you people, constructive criticism is always welcome.

Bonus!!!
We tried to re-create Delhi Belly with limited set of skills & knowledge. Here’s what we made :

Enjoy!

 

Welcome To The Age Of Information Overflow

noise

It’s the year 2015 and now Internet is cheap, handsets are cheap, multiple platforms for information,much noise, too much information overflow right?

Yes,far too much and everyone has an opinion about everything. Everybody wants to be a singer[or is it just me?]So many mediums like buzzfeed, twitter, facebook, youtube, reddit. But first, watch this video to know what I am saying.

Overabundance, overflow and inundation of information wears you out.How do you streamline social media and feeds to your liking? How do you not miss the important stuff and cut down on misuse?

Everybody may have their way out, this is my way to avoid getting worn out from information overflow:

  1. Twitter list: It’s best to create a list with people from various categories that you want to read/learn from and intently follow.
  2. Subscribe via e-mail: There are bunch of interesting people who write amazing blogs & not only should you subscribe to them, but make time to read their posts.
  3. Pocket: With pocket, one can add a list of interesting stories that can be read offline especially when on commute.
  4. Podcast Addict: I use this software on my phone to listen to selected list of podcasts.
  5. Hacker news: For those daily updates around the tech community or new announcements and sometimes interesting shares, this is my go to.
  6. Reddit:   Reddit is great for those daily updates of all the news that is related to India.
  7. Growthhackers &  Producthunt: This is my daily dosage of story,insights related to startup, productivity, marketing.
  8. Feedly: This software gets you RSS feed across the internet and lets you categorize the feeds. The bonus feature it converts content to audio.

If I’ve missed something, please share your thoughts and tools which you use to avoid information overflow. I am sure it will be very useful to me.

Retired sailor hobbyist fishermen #faces

Krishna
Krishna

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Name: Krishna

Place: Mandvi beach, Gujarat

Occupation: Hobbyist fishermen

Krishna, a stark looking 65 year old was silently surveying the sea when I first caught sight of him at Mandvi Beach. In conversation, he tells me that he has sailed across Africa and the Gulf during his early days in the navy.He intently discusses how effortless it was back in the day to become a sailor where education and literacy never mattered to pursue a career in the navy.

As a man of the sea, he has witnessed the hardships of being a sailor. He actively agrees that technology plays a crucial role in aiding captains to avert disasters at sea by almost accurately warning sailors of uneasy circumstances that they may encounter. He narrates about one of his journeys to Mozambique where the entire crew survived on boiled potatoes for almost five whole days to endure a stormy situation.

I asked him how he spends his retirement, to which he placidly gestures at the beach as a hobbyist fishermen. Through Krishna, I learnt that fishing is illegal unless you have the license issued by the government  for which he pays Rs 300 as licence fee to fish at Mandvi beach.

He tells me he two kids, a daughter who works as a principal in a government college and a son working in Saudi Arabia which makes him content to live his life as a fisherman.

Footnote: This post is part of #faces series i am working on.


I work remotely and this is my toolkit

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It has been over 1.5 yrs since i started working from home. I enjoyed everyday because i was independent & had no mandatory requirement like reaching office by 9 am, getting stuck into traffic and all.

I felt like sharing software i use everyday for collaborating with my remote team & keeping myself productive while working remotely.

Skype/Zoom.us 
Skype has been pain for us off late, we were happy with it before so now we are using zoom.us

Asana
I love Asana, it has organizing overall project much easier. You can assign project to individual member, keep list of people as watcher. It does what we were looking for.

Google Apps
For e-mail, calendar, document sharing and chat we are using google apps.

Workflowy
I do most of my daily task tracking using workflowy. It is a very simple app and helps me in prioritizing my daily work.

Selfcontrol
I use this app to control my distraction, it stops me from using social media & other listed sites by myself during my work hour.

Why Start-ups?

ship

One of the perks of living in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, is the fact that I encounter a lot of entrepreneurs on a daily basis. Based on my rendezvous with these people, I keep asking them this one question : Why do you want to launch a startup?

Most of my friends who are steadily building careers with startups always give me some interesting answers. Based  on their replies, I have formulated my own logic of understanding their perceptions of working with a startup.

 In this post, I am going to keep my examples limited to the Indian companies only:

 Why build startups in India?

  1. It is supposed to aid in solving problems affecting us.
  2. They are built around the inherent Indian condition.
  3. They aim to work towards fitting in the product market.
  4. It is also intended to grow quickly financially.

Aim To Solve Problems Affecting Citizens:

Most startups aim to assist the public get their work done efficiently. While some are built to improve our everyday living, others are serving as an aid to out of reach citizens to enable them to get their regular work done prudently. In my discussions with many of my friends in the startup business, they unanimously agree that startups are more useful when they improve the state of affairs of the current situations.

For ex: the company,Practo, has connected doctors to patients by using a mobile app and it was the need of the hour & these guys just made it happen. At the same time, if you’re looking for a food joint to dine in town Zomato has that covered. Similarly, to book a bus ticket, redbus is the solution.

Build Around The Inherent Indian Condition:

India is a population of a billion individuals. The start ups may be successful elsewhere but in India you have to adapt to the Indian psyche. I appreciate that a company like Mcdonald’s or KFC is constricted to serving pure veg food minus the beef that is cleverly altered to suit the average Indian consumer. This kind of smart marketing is required to understand the audience.   Another example is Amazon, highly successful in the US but struggling to dominate in India due to stiff competition with FlipKart.  One more is Uber that is struggling in India to defeat OlaCabs, their Indian competitor who is gaining more brownie points with its customers over Uber.

Fit The Start-Up Product In The Market:

I get to hear this all the time, a product to fit the market. Whatsapp became an immediate hit with the audience because of the rapid smartphone adoption & its minimal 2G requirement. I can surely say, it literally killed the SMS business. While Yahoo chat had all those emoji features in 2008-09 but nobody cared about it due to a less internet penetration. It was launched ahead of its time and hence failed. Startups require accurate timing to click and succeed.  With 3G and mobile technology reaching out to most of the masses at a very rapid pace, I am sure life will be easier for any startups launching products in this era.

Growing Financially.

Its a generation that wants to make the big bucks quickly and enjoy an early retirement compared to our forefathers.This is absolutely perfect if you have a success plan. Unfortunately, most of the startup founders end up making very little because of stock dilutions.  I remember watching the YC startup school video where one of the co-founders mentioned that rather than starting your own startup, your chances of making more money is while being part of one of the top 10 employers(like google/facebook). So think about. If money is what is only driving you towards a new startup, maybe  you got it wrong.

So, there you have it. In total disclamation, I have written this post to highlight the essence of startup business in India and to guide you to understand the purpose and difficulty to launch your own. In no way am I certain that this is the fast rule to a successful venture, but atleast through the experiences of others can focus on providing frugal tips to benefit any new launch.

Shipmaker who traveled across Africa and Gulf #faces

Isa Ismail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Name: Isa Ismail

Place: Mandvi, Gujarat

Occupation: Ship architect [wooden ship]

In my quest to discover how ships are built at the backwater port of Mandavi, I came across this 60 year old stalwart individual.Isa bhai, as I respectfully call him had a flourishing career in building wooden ships, a trait he instinctively inherited from his forefathers. Mandavi is a small township in Gujarat that was once famous for building wooden ships at its serene beach.

Over a cup of chai on a makeshift wooden ship which was currently under maintenance, Isa bhai shared his story with me. He tells me that today the market for wooden ships is bleak and so survives on  maintenance of existing wooden ships that are brought to him for servicing. The maintenance of a single ship can take more than five or six months to deem fit. They only work for 6 months in a year due to the influence of extravagant weather conditions. With a team of 25 odd carpenters and helpers, Isa bhai is currently working on fixing a wooden ship traveled from Oman that is in a sort of pathetic condition.

I was eager to explore the ship, but Isa bhai disapproved my request advising me to do so at my own peril. It was a good forty minutes spent discovering the ship and understanding the craft that goes into making a wooden ship.

Footnote: This post is part of #faces series i am working on.

 

Thoughts after attending Gophercon India

gophercon

At the successful completion of the first-ever Go conference in India, I was proud to be part of the Go programming centric event ‘GopherCon India’ held in my city,Bengaluru. I’m Atul Jha, community manager for The New Stack and I absolutely had a great time participating at the GopherCon  event held last week.

As part of the open source languages, Go also referred to as golang, is a programming language that was developed by Google. The Go language community in India organized the GopherCon India to showcase the importance of this language by inviting esteemed speakers from around the world to share their experiences of using golang.

Organizing any event is no cake walk and I can definitely relate to it after helping organize mukt.in and Open Stack India Day. The stipulation to be successful includes striking a performance balance with sponsors and guests alike. Meeting demands and satisfying audiences is largely challenging, but in the end the results of the event speak for themselves.

At GopherCon India, the event saw an invitee list of about 350 participants from various part of India and abroad. Gophercon mainly showcased developers but free tickets were sponsored to students to participate and they did justice to the invite.I was fortunate to get a chance to interact with some highly skilled set of people from veterans, colleagues and a good set of golang contributors.

Here is my note analysis of the event from my perspective that made me believe in the success of attending GopherCon India. Looking forward to their return soon as the overall event was indeed prosperous and very effective for learners like me.

  1. Look out, Go is turning out to be an interesting language especially due to its attractive feature of concurrency.
  2. At the conference, many speakers highlighted that companies are investing in moving their infrastructure from  Python, Ruby, Nodejs to Go.
  3. Go makes static packaging extremely seem accessible which prevents the need for innate  dependency.
  4. Unlike in some other programming languages, with Go you have to keep an open mind & ignore the idioms of the older programming languages.
  5. Go is still evolving. For the same number of CMS or frameworks in php/python, Go offers a few,namely Revel, Goji, beego among others.
  6. Like any other growing open source project, documentation is one area where Go needs assistance.
  7. Docker is written in Go, incase finding a job is your prime motivation
  8. Go community is very welcoming & inclusive to all. If you find yourself brimming for completion, all you have to do is just ask for help.
  9. Go is already used in various interesting domains like image processing, IoT, electronics and they proclaim that it is just the beginning.
  10. At the event, I made some fine friends and I am hoping to stay in touch with for sure. It was really captivating to be invited to visit Mexico & Romania by some of my companions.  .

Visit https://golang.org/ to start using Go. I am hopeful with regular meetups in India, we will be able to build a greater community of Go in India and start seeing more contributions from India as we are doing with Python, Ruby, OpenStack and many more.

On Mentors

lama

Last year, around the same time, I was in pain, kinda suffering, a little frustrated among many things. In simple terms I was totally screwed with my life and I prefer not mentioning those depressing reasons here.

So anyway, 4 things happened to me that kind of put me back on track :

  1. I packed my bags & went to my classmates hometown in Nagaland. During my stay I attended his uncles funeral. He passed away due to heart attack. It was a sad moment for my friend & his family, atleast I was there for him at his time of need.

— I learnt a hard lesson, life is truly about living today not living for tomorrow.

—  When we die neither our twitter followers or our bank account accompanies use. We go alone leaving all our assets behind.

  1. Somebody re-tweeted a post by James Altucher “Live Your Life As If Everyone Else Was Going to Die Today”. I liked the post and started reading and listening to his podcast. Here are his beliefs:

— Money is not everything, it will come and go.

— Happiness is key to everything.

— Things don’t happen automatically, you have to work hard for it.

— Failures are part of life, you have to learn from it and move on.

— Its good to be crazy, sometimes!

— Ask for what you want and never be afraid to ask for help.

  1. While reading this  blog post  of James Altucher I got to came across another inspiration Kamal Ravikant and his book called “Love Yourself As If Your Life Depended On It”. I immediately purchased the book and spent a whole day reading it. Here is what I learnt:

— Your life is most important for you.

— You get one life to live.

— Eat healthy and think well.

— Practice yoga and listen to good music.

— Take failures in love and life as learning lessons.Don’t feel bad about it just learn from it.

— Do things which make you happy. Meet people who are happy.

  1. “Who Will Cry When You Die?” by  Robin Sharma. I was in the bookstore when I came across this book.If I remember correctly it had about 26-27 chapters in all. Here is what I read :

— Time is now.

— Don`t regret about the past.

— Take failures in stride as important learning lessons.

— List out things that will make you happy & start working on it.

Why This Post?

I had a twitter conversation with Deepthi & so I am writing this for her. Hope it turns out useful for others as well.

BTW, how am I doing now? What is my current state?

I would summarise my life to be more meaningful, happier and peaceful. I am living my life every single day. I’ve traveled across  different cities [1], eaten some crazy insects[2], started writing regularly, meeting interesting people and now doing extraordinary stuff [3]. Life is indeed good!

[1] http://atuljha.com/blog/2014/04/16/what-was-i-doing-all-this-while/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2vVnoJkI50

[3] http://atuljha.com/blog/2015/01/11/faces-ordinary-people-with-extraordinary-efforts/

 

Notes from Steve Jobs documentary

I’ve always been an advocate of free software which simply gives users the freedom to run the software for any purpose. Gradually, my application of thought towards free software is changing and I would say that it is mainly because you cannot impose software on users. While some find it easy to use, for others it may be more complex than anticipated. In the end, it is all about good choices, what works for somebody may not necessarily work out for you.

lo

Everyday at lunch, I relish browsing Youtube for inspirational documentaries from software pundits. One such documentary I recently viewed was from the highly successful American entrepreneur, marketer,inventor and cofounder of Apple Inc -the very remarkable Steve Jobs.

Personally, I always kind of believed that Steve Jobs was just a great marketing guy but after watching this video on Youtube, I immediately realized he was much more than that.

Here is my keynote analysis on the man’s marketing & leadership qualities that turned Apple into a multi billion dollar company :

  • A true leader must be a visionary & peoples person, Steve was loved by all his coworkers and peers for these traits.
  • The pillar of a successful enterprise depends on the strength of its team and is not an individual’s ideals.
  • Customer feedback and suggestions are vital for business growth. It is very important to listen/understand/learn from all customer suggestions.
  • We are already living in a complex world which makes our task of producing products that are simple for everyone to use more challenging.
  • Cut down costs on competitive products and instead create a marketing strategy which makes your product stand out in the market.
  • Connect with customers requirements & you have won half the battle in the consumer market.
  • Always believe that you are never to old to learn anything new whether it is a new skill, language or creative assets, experimenting is the best form of practice.
  • When times are tough, it is important to make crucial decisions setting aside the emotions.
  • Your biggest rivals in the industry are also your biggest teachers. They possess different qualities that you can learn from and teach you, so keep them in the loop. Bill Gates & Steve Jobs shared a very cordial relationship.
  • Seeking help is not a sign of weakness, ask for, help and you will find it useful. For instance, who would have thought that Microsoft would once bailout Apple
  • In some ventures, Apple’s ethics were tested, but Steve Jobs effectively invented the first modern computer mouse by taking the concept from Xerox which many questioned.
  • In his quest for inner peace, Steve Jobs visited India & learnt about Buddhism.
  • It is not always about making money.Sometimes it is about doing what you love and having the faith in producing what you dream of.When Steve Jobs made a reentry in Apple,the company saw a whole new level of success.
  • Always have an open mind. Listen and observe around you and learn from what you see and experience.
  • When you pursue a dream, you don’t have to block your life because of demanding society. Life will take its course if you pursue a dream. From college to securing a  job, settling down in marriage with kids and finally a grand retirement is only inevitable for successful dream chasers.
  • Stay hungry, stay foolish.Always aim for more and most importantly, spend every moment being happy.

The question I asked myself after watching this documentary and then writing this post is whether I am not smitten by Apple and their products? I dont think I am.

I see things differently, and learning more about Steve Jobs struggles to success has just open up my mind to believe that not all things are as peachy on the surface as they tend to look.

Someone aptly said that even your bitter foe has something worth learning from.In the process, I am starting to accept everyone’s belief with an open mind.