The 1909 letter that precipitated restrooms on Indian trains

Click on the document to be taken to the source.

Fake experience letters

I have blogged about H1B visa scams in the past; click  here and here. My blog posts on it have been quite popular (at least relative to my other posts).

My blog’s dashboard showed a visitor from Google yesterday, with the search query

“from where can i get fake experience letters in chennai”

I guess the visa fraud industry is alive and well in spite of the economic downturn.

From Friedman’s ‘Capitalism and Freedom’

I’m re-reading Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. I was raised in India during its socialist days, and for that reason, I can identify with what Friedman writes.

I’ll blog excerpts that I find to be particularly relevant. Today’s quote:

“Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. ”

Indian Government sues the Internet

Someone please put Indian IT minister Sibal out of his misery.

He’s now off suing the Internet (or at least Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft) for “for offences of promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration”.

Didn’t know that the Indian Republic, tracing back to a 5,000 year history, founded by such stalwarts as Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar, and forged through a freedom struggle of some 90-odd years is so fragile as to disintegrate due to posts on Facebook, Yahoo, Google and whatever Microsoft puts out.

Only in India, kids.

Birthers, Tea Partiers and now… Socialists. Where’s the GOP headed?

The Republican primary season is now becoming a theater of the absurd. First it was people demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Then it was the Tea Partiers, who prized supposed ideological purity over all else, including electability. Now, is it socialism?

The newspapers are filled with accounts of how Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and their SuperPAC minions are attacking Mitt Romney for his time at Bain. Supposedly, Romney’s company fired a lot of people after taking over perfectly good companies, thereby pocketing the profits. One ad, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, states thus: “The company was Bain Capital, more ruthless than Wall Street.”

Republicans attacking a market economy? Well I guess pigs can fly.

The job of a company in any free economy is not to generate jobs. Instead, it is to deploy capital most efficiently to generate profits for its shareholders. And in doing this well, employment is generated and dollars are put to good use. For what happens when the sole purpose of employment is to generate jobs, look no further than two companies in India that I have blogged about in the past: Hindustan Cables and Haldia Fertilizers. The former does not produce an inch of cable, and the latter, not an ounce of fertilizer. Yet they provide employment to thousands (literally), wasting precious capital that could be put to use elswhere in India’s economy.

When evaluating a company, we were taught in MBA class to see it as a series of cash flows. And there are rather simple mathematical formulae to calculate the value of all future cash flows in today’s dollars. Its called the Net Present Value or NPV. Now, if you’re the owner of a company that is offered a buyout by Bain Capital, you look at your NPV. If Bain offers you more cash today than your NPV, you’re better off taking the money and investing it elsewhere. And in return, Bain either makes your company more efficient, or sells it for its parts. Perhaps they know a thing or two about running your company more efficiently, and therefore their cash flow projections are better than yours. And based on these better cash flows, they’re able to offer you a better price than your own future cash flows.

How can the situation be improved? Certainly not by railing agaist capitalism (how ironic that Republicans have started doing it). Its simply by allowing the owner to realize a better series of cash flows, thus preventing him from selling or breaking up the company. And how’s that done? There are many ways… allow him to sell more; reduce his expenses through reduced regulation, keeping interest rates low by keeping government borrowing low, keeping taxes low, keeping the NLRB in check, preventing ADA misuse… the list is endless.

But I guess, regardless of political affiliation, a good politician does not let truth and facts get in the way.

Update: there’s a great article from WSJ describing what private equity does. While I argue above as to why any owner would want to sell their business to private equity, the WSJ article talks more about what private equity companies do once they buy a firm.

Ludicrous smartphone names

Came across this gem in a promotional email sent by AT&T:

Samsung Galaxy S (TM) II Skyrocket (TM)

I can’t think of anyone that woke up one fine morning and said “I gotta get me one of those Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrockets”. Is this the best that the combined marketing departments of Samsung and AT&T could come up with?

Indian justice system rides to the rescue

Judges in India have finally thought it fit to come to the rescue of the hapless Indian. What might they have thrown the lawbook at?

• Corrupt politicians?
• Lawlessness?
• Poor governance?
• Sub-saharan Infrastructure?
• Inflation?
• Lack of economic reforms?
• Governmental ineptitude  in handling terrorism?

No, silly. The greatest threat to the Republic of India (estd. 1947) comes from dirty pictures on Facebook and Google. Justices of India, borrowing a leaf from from China, that other great font of Democracy and Freedom, have summoned various online companies to answer for all the dirty content on their web sites. Of course, the great and farsighted politician, Kapil Sibal (he of the subsidized $35 tablet fame) also thought it fit to summon all these companies to complain about the naughty stuff online.

In any free society, norms of decency cannot be legislated. Society must decide what is acceptable and what is not. Surely, if one does not care much for dirty pictures or content, all one has to do is to not browse it. I have not heard any reports of Facebook or Google execs waylaying innocent Indians and thrusting all manner of pornography in their face.

And by the way, who gave these worthies (whether Kapil Sibal or the Indian judiciary) the right to sit in moral judgment over what’s obscene? Denying freedoms to the Indian citizen is a slippery slope. Today its alleged dirty content on the Internet. Tomorrow, it could be youngsters in jeans who are considered obscene. Oh wait, that’s happened already. And the day after, anything that’s determined obscene by the ruler of the day will be. Welcome to the Indian version of Saudi Arabia.

Does capitalism hurt or help the downtrodden in India?

The old dogma, perpetuated by politicians of every hue in India is how a market economy and capitalism exploit the poor and underprivileged.

The new reality is that capitalism helps uplift those on the lowest rung of society… the people we would derogatorily refer not too long ago as “shudras”, or the lowest rung in the caste hierarchy. Read this article and look at the smile on the face of the mother… she has probably endured discrimination and insults her entire life. Her joy is palpable.

How brick and mortar retailers can win in an online world

Amazon’s price comparison app has stireed up a hornet’s nest among brick and mortar retailers. Though I haven’t used this particular app, similar apps on my mobile phone allow me to scan a barcode and search for the product online.

Understandably, brick and mortar retailers are very worried about becoming mere showrooms for online stores. Their concern is that a shopper will visit the store, examine the product and then order it online for a lower price. They have come up with various strategies to prevent this from happening… asking people caught barcode scanning to leave, removing barcodes from merchandise, and borrowing from the mattress industry, coming up with exclusive lines for each retail chain to thwart direct comparison.

These steps are ineffective. Customers can still type in the product name into their smartphones, if BestBuy decides to remove barcodes. Asking potential customers to leave the store is terrible business practice, barcode or no barcode. And while exclusive lines work for mattresses, where the decision is very subjective, it will hardly work for electronics where innumerable online forums offer comparisons between even the slightest brand variants.

A better approach would be for brick and mortar retailers to leverage their strengths… they have the customer physically present in store, and have an opportunity to build a deeper face-to-face relationship. How about store associates that are actually knowledgeable? And how about offering in-store warranty service? If I do not have to mail my malfunctioning electronics halfway across the continent to have it repaired but instead have my local BestBuy turn around a repair within a week, would I buy from there? Absolutely! This would be especially useful in gadgets with high failure rates, for example, laptops.

And for a revolutionary idea, how about letting the prospective customer “borrow” a demonstrator for a few days? The customer can try the product in the privacy of their own home, and if they don’t like it they can turn it back in, no questions asked. A fee can be charged, which would be waived upon in-store purchase of the product. Would I like to try this with a cell phone or a camera? You bet! I’d happily pay 50 bucks to have one for a couple days so I make the right decision on a 500 dollar purchase.

For people like my parents, who find newfangled gadgets difficult to use, how about in-store classes on how to use their newly purchased camera/smartphone/other gadget? It doesn’t have to be free.

A commentator on a newspaper’s website put it best: Amazon does not complain about an unfair playing field… the brick and mortar retailer has the customer in store, can talk to them and sell them on goods, and the customer is holding the product in their hand. Amazon is at least 24 hours removed from having the product in the customer’s hand and they never get to see the buyer, much less talk to him. Amazon’s not complaining. Why should retailers?

Lesson in how to head off a crisis before it snowballs

A good example of proper crisis handling, and getting ahead of the story before it becomes a huge PR disaster.

A FedEx customer posted video to YouTube of the delivery man throwing the customer’s monitor over a fence. As it turns out the customer’s surveillance camera caught the entire episode.

FedEx handled this potential crisis with a straightforward and frank apology. And they did not issue a PR release. They had one of their Senior VPs (note, not a low-level PR flunkey) go on YouTube and issue it on video. They conveyed their response through the same medium that the original complaint was raised. And what’s more important, they did not hide behind weasel words or legalese. It was direct.