India’s obsession with crimes committed by software engineers

 

A long overdue and awesome article has come up on Bloomberg. About the media craze behind ‘techie’ crimes in India. Specially, in Bangalore. It also hints to the kind of resentment the locals have towards ‘techie’ outsiders

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prachi Das was murdered on a Monday. The killer, a friend of her husband’s named Basudev Jena, showed up at her apartment in Bangalore on March 2, 2015, in hopes she would help him with his debts. Jena hadn’t meant to hurt Das, he later told the police, but he lost his temper when she refused to lend him money. He tried to tear away her necklace, and when Das screamed he cut her throat. The landlady stopped him in the hallway as he tried to flee, his shirt stained with blood.

In India, print newspapers thrive as if it were 1995. They’re numerous and energetic, and they rush to the scene of a good story. Das’s murder was a sensation, and each publication did what it could to distinguish its coverage. The Indian Express dwelt on the meaning of a carton of ice cream found melting near her body, and the Times of India floated an alternate theory of the crime, speculating that Das had screamed because she saw a rat, leading Jena to panic. But all the papers agreed on the overriding importance of a single, seemingly inconsequential detail: Both Jena and Das’s husband were software engineers. Or, as the profession is known in India, they were techies.

“TECHIE’S WIFE MURDERED” read the headlines in both the Hindu and the Bangalore Mirror. “TECHIE STABS FRIEND’S WIFE TO DEATH” ran in the Deccan Herald. To read the Indian newspapers regularly is to believe the software engineer is the country’s most cursed figure. Almost every edition carries a gruesome story involving a techie accused of homicide, rape, burglary, blackmail, assault, injury, suicide, or another crime. When techies are the victims, it’s just as newsworthy. The Times of India, the country’s largest English-language paper, has carried “TECHIE DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT” and “MAN HELD FOR PUSHING TECHIE FROM TRAIN”; in the Hindu, readers found “TEACHER CHOPS OFF FINGERS OF TECHIE HUSBAND” and “TECHIE DIED AFTER BEING FORCE-FED CYANIDE.” A long-standing journalistic adage says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In India, if it codes, it explodes.

The epicenter of techie tragedy is Bangalore, a city in the southern state of Karnataka that bills itself as India’s Silicon Valley. Bangalore has more startups than any other city in the country and is home to Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle, in addition to big domestic information technology companies such as Infosys and Wipro. More than 10 percent of Bangalore’s 10.5 million residents work in tech, giving journalists plenty of unfortunate events to sensationalize: “ASSAULT OVER BANANA SPLIT: 3 TECHIES HELD”; “DEPRESSED BANGALORE TECHIE INJURES 24 IN SWORD ATTACK SPREE.”

The resentment implicit in techie headlines occasionally spills over into actual violence

When I visited the city in September, the Bangaloreans I met fondly recounted their favorite techie stories from the local press. One involved a couple whose nanny secretly rented out their baby to street beggars. Another featured a software engineer who pretended to be an astrologer to trick his wife into confessing infidelity, then bludgeoned her to death with a religious idol and, for good measure, called in bomb threats to the airport pretending to be the husband of an ex-girlfriend with whom he hoped to get back together.

Reddit users recently observed that the “Indian techie” has become like the “Florida man” meme in America: an archetype of incompetent criminality and hapless violence. But in India, the techie is also celebrated as a symbol of the country’s ascendancy in the global economy. “In a society where there are no heroes, techies are the only heroes,” said Mohandas Pai, a venture capitalist, in his corner office on the top floor of a building near Bangalore’s central park. “A techie is a person you look up to with great respect,” he said, adding that the media’s sordid stories “are just sensationalizing.”

Even if that’s true, the coverage resonates with readers. The resentment implicit in techie headlines occasionally spills over into actual violence. On Sept. 12, riots broke out across Bangalore after a court ordered Karnataka to share water with a neighboring state. Thirsty mobs targeted the well-kept Oracle office, which had to be evacuated, as well as eight Infosys employee buses, whose passengers were forced to walk home under a hail of stones.

Technology was supposed to deliver India from poverty, but in Bangalore it’s also deepened the division between rich and poor, young and old, modern and traditional. As the city has grown richer, it’s also become unruly and unfamiliar. If the tech worker is the star of the Indian economy, then the techie is his shadow—spoiled, untrustworthy, adulterous, depressed, and sometimes just plain senseless. (“TECHIE WITH EARPHONES RUN OVER BY TRAIN.”) In one occupational boogeyman, Bangaloreans can see their future and their fears.

Hundred Feet Road runs through Indiranagar, a once-quiet neighborhood that’s now the center of the Bangalore tech scene. It feels as if someone diverted a highway through a shopping mall. Shops and restaurants crowd the sidewalks like spectators at a parade, and rooftop pubs crank their music to drown the clamor from the street. People complain that Bangalore’s traffic is the worst in India, and the eight lanes of Hundred Feet Road often come to a standstill as drivers, trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible, make it impossible for anyone to get anywhere at all. Only the cows, headed nowhere, enjoy the right of way.

Across from an Adidas shop, Chiranjiv Singh, the former development commissioner of Karnataka state, lives in a small but verdant plot—a sliver of the wilderness he found when he moved there 40 years ago. The land was a coconut grove then, and a few tall trees still lend his home their shade. The birds and monkeys have stopped visiting, though, and Singh, a soft-spoken Sikh with a long and coarse beard, expects he will leave soon, too: “I don’t know how long we can continue here because of all this noise.”

Bangalore gridlock: Natives bitterly complain about the role of techies in crippling the city’s infrastructure.

Photograph: Kuni Takahashi/The New York Times via Redux

Bangalore used to be known as the Garden City. It was a medium-size, middle-class metropolis in one of the few areas of India that didn’t broil in summertime. Colonial bungalows nestled among flower beds, old trees, and pristine lakes. “I have discussed the subject of Bangalore with persons in other parts of India and have found that 90 out of a hundred dream of settling down in Bangalore, after retirement,” the novelist R.K. Narayan wrote in 1977. Another nickname for the city was the Pensioner’s Paradise.

Bangalore’s makeover began in the 1980s. Previously a center of textiles, aerospace, and electronics, the city became an outsourcing hub as undersea fiber-optic cables made it possible for U.S. and European corporations to offshore IT work. Texas Instruments opened a software-design center there in 1985; Infosys, an omnibus software and services provider, went public in 1993; and three years later a local coder invented Hotmail. By the turn of the century, Bangalore had established a reputation for coding quality software at low cost, and corporations hired the city’s engineers en masse to guard their systems against the Y2K bug. Bangalore inspired Thomas Friedman’s 2005 best-seller on globalization, The World Is Flat.

From 1981 to 2001, Bangalore doubled its population, to 5.7 million. The invaders had a name. “We had a new occupational category emerge: the IT engineer,” said Balaji Parthasarathy, a professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore. IT engineers brought a lot of benefits. Real income grew much faster in Bangalore than in other parts of India, and the city became the country’s main link to the economies of the West. “We have more connections with Silicon Valley than with Delhi,” said Pai. “Bangalore is India’s only global city.”

But the IT engineers lived differently from the pensioners and other longtime residents. They spoke English, not the native Kannada, and lived in gated condominium towers with pools and fitness clubs rather than in traditional bungalows. They worked in amenity-rich office parks, shopped in designer malls, ate at Western chain restaurants, and socialized in posh microbreweries. And their strange habits were chronicled by the booming local press.

The word “techie” first appeared in newspaper headlines in the 1990s simply because it was shorter than “software engineer.” Readers loved the stories, and editors soon went out of their way to assign them. “The news value of anything to do with a techie seems to be more,” said B. Pradeep Nair, the news editor of the Hindu, in his office, as that day’s edition was being put to bed. Media consultant Imran Qureshi recalled a story he covered 15 years ago about a married couple in Chennai who were producing child pornography. That in itself wasn’t scandalous enough to make the story a sensation. “It became a headline story because the man happened to be an IT professional,” Qureshi said.

Today, Indian journalists apply the word “techie” to anyone remotely connected to the IT industry. Some headlines imply that techies are more important than other people, such as “TECHIE AMONG THREE BURNT ALIVE IN GARUDA BUS MISHAP.” Other stories tell of incidents so minor they seem to exist only so the journalist can use the word. The Herald recently reported on a techie who had stepped on a “brittle footpath slab” and suffered “swelling in his leg.”

The close scrutiny makes the techie seem alien, like a strange specimen in a cage. “When we use ‘techie,’ it is a bit of a local-vs.-outsider thing,” said Ravi Joshi, editor of the Bangalore Mirror, in his newsroom. “It is basically the profession that does not belong here.”

One afternoon in Bangalore, my Uber driver, Chethan J., invited me to join him in the front seat of the car. (Many Indians use a single name, or mononym, sometimes with an initial.) We were in the center lane of one of the city’s busiest roads, which meant, of course, that we weren’t moving. Chethan is 22, with thick black hair and a mustache grown long at the tips. Thinking to myself, When in Bangalore, do as Thomas Friedman does, I asked him for a driver’s-eye view of tech workers. Chethan’s mood darkened. “They are coming and destroying our culture,” he said. Industry boosters are fond of saying that each tech job creates anywhere from 3 to 10 support jobs in the city, but Chethan had no affection for the engineers he ferried around all day. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics and joined Uber only when he couldn’t find a better-paying job. “The locals are servants,” he said. “All of Bangalore is going bad.”

The tech boom that was supposed to profit the city has made daily life harder. Bangalore’s population has doubled again since 2000, buckling the local infrastructure. There are more than 6 million vehicles, and the average driving speed in the city center is below 6 miles per hour, meaning it would be faster for everyone to jog slowly than to drive. During the initial IT boom, the portion of Bangalore’s population living in slums doubled. Blackouts became daily occurrences, and road-widening projects destroyed parks and trees without decongesting the streets. Money flooded in, but the lakes dried up—of the 900 the city once counted, fewer than 200 are still considered “live,” and most of those are filled with sewage. In October, thousands protested in the streets over plans to build a multibillion-dollar elevated bypass connecting the Bangalore airport to the city center. Demonstrators argued the project would benefit the jet-setting elite but do little to help poorer residents who spend hours every day in gridlock.

“They’re always before the system. It makes them behave like a beast, almost”

Frustration was palpable all over Bangalore. A kindly older man named Vijay Thiruvady, who leads tours of the botanical gardens and Cubbon Park, the city’s largest remaining green spaces, rued the failure of the IT industry and government to coordinate the growth. “The tech boom has completely changed the city. They’ve ruined it,” he said, as we sat in yet another traffic jam. “I’m going to use a strong term,” he warned, before cursing another motorist as “a stupid fellow.” Then he resumed grousing about techies.

“With the coming of the techies, you can see the traffic, you can see the road rage, you can see the problems with infrastructure, you can see trees being cut everywhere,” said Narayanan Krishnaswami, a reporter with the Times of India. “For a lot of people, that is a repudiation of what the city used to be. And they trace it back to the cause of the prosperity, which is the tech sector.”

One of the main appeals of the newspapers’ techie coverage is schadenfreude. “When a techie falls, everyone is secretly happy,” said Joshi, the Mirror editor. Techies arriving from across India are assumed to be more interested in the Western lifestyles of the modern workplace than the local culture of their new city. They tend to live away from their parents, drink alcohol, spend money freely, travel abroad, keep strange hours (because they work on the schedules of U.S. and European clients), and choose “love marriages” over traditional arranged ones.

Someone who suspects tech workers of immorality would find plenty of grist in the newspapers, where techies are frequently killing their spouses and having affairs. Such stories sometimes implicate the victim in his fate. An article might note, for example, that the parents of a woman whose techie husband killed her had disapproved of the marriage, or that a techie killed himself after a “trivial” argument with his wife.

Taken together, the stories can read like morality plays. They assuage a reader’s envy by suggesting that a tech worker’s material wealth conceals a deeper poverty. “If a techie can commit suicide or kill his own wife,” said Sahana Udupa, a social anthropologist who previously worked as a journalist in Bangalore, “it says something about the stress, something about the depression, something about their loose morals.”

I thought it unlikely that tech workers were genuinely troublesome, so I visited the Bangalore police headquarters to ask for an official perspective. Bureaucracies in India like to unfurl themselves before visitors, and the police commissioner on the first floor referred me to an additional police commissioner down the hall, who referred me to a deputy police commissioner on the fifth floor, who was so thrilled by my visit that he paused our interview midway to take my photo with his phone. His name was M.G. Nagendra Kumar, and a few years earlier he had studied crimes involving software engineers. He concluded that the techie “lacked the general thinking of other common people,” he told me. “His mind works like a computer machine.”

Kumar said the techie’s long hours in front of a PC could make him dangerously impatient: “He wants life to go at internet speed.” At a busy intersection, a techie wouldn’t wait for the signal. “Only techies are the deceased in road accident cases,” Kumar said. And at home, a techie might grow angry and violent with a wife or family member who didn’t follow commands automatically like his computer. At this point, a police inspector named Kanakalakshmi (also a mononym), who’d been sitting quietly beside me in Kumar’s office, spoke up. “They’re always before the system,” she said. “It makes them behave like a beast, almost.”

India’s largest IT companies, including Wipro, draw young workers whose ways are often at odds with local tradition.

Photographer: Altaf Qadri/AP

Kanakalakshmi produced two spreadsheets. The first listed 139 cases since 2010 in which a software engineer had been accused of a crime; the second listed 297 cases, excluding petty thefts, in which a software engineer had filed a complaint. Neither sum really suggested a crime wave in a city with more than 1 million tech workers, and it was hard to make sense of the statistics. The translation from Kannada to English had rendered many case descriptions unintelligible, and the spreadsheets seemed to exclude certain cases I’d read about in the papers while listing others twice.

It was nevertheless interesting that the most common complaint by far was a spouse alleging mental and physical harassment (in some cases, the police use the word “torture”), often in connection to a dowry dispute. The clash between the traditional expectations of Indian culture and the demands of modern professional lives doesn’t only shape the relationship between techies and the rest of the city, it also plays out in tech workers’ private lives. “Social liberalization hasn’t kept pace with economic liberalization,” said Asha Rai, a senior editor at the Times of India. “The values they imbibe at the workplace and when they travel are in conflict when they come home.”

I wasn’t attacked by sword, pushed from a train, force-fed cyanide, tortured, or otherwise harmed by any of the techies I met in Bangalore. I was introduced to coders, startup founders, investors, and engineers, including a group that was building a moon lander for Google’s Lunar X Prize competition. A robotics specialist from IBM named Aswin Subramanian gave me a tour of Whitefield, a tech district, in his race car and then invited me to his home, where he played Yanni songs on a keyboard. (OK, perhaps there was some torture.)

Techies in Bangalore extol a strain of utopianism similar to that found in Silicon Valley. “Eventually everything will be solved by tech,” said Mukund Jha, the co-founder of Dunzo, a concierge app that lets users hire a runner to carry out almost any task for a few dozen rupees—less than a dollar. At the moment, a Dunzo runner was fetching him a coffee from Starbucks; he’d also used the service to repair the cracked screen of his iPhone and install pigeon nets on his balcony at home. Customers have used Dunzo to retrieve lost phone chargers, deliver birthday cakes, purchase toilet paper, and check whether a shop is open. “Once you get started, you get hooked to it,” Jha said. “On a good day, you can get anything you want within 10 minutes.”

Dunzo is incredibly useful in a city where completing simple tasks grows harder by the day. But the app also indicates how technology further cocoons the privileged from the rest of the city. Dunzo’s founders say they hope their app will trickle down to the masses, but they’ve targeted early builds at the elite. “We haven’t seen a single request which is non-English,” Jha said.

Although tech has offered millions of young Indians a ladder out of poverty, there’s also concern that it will soon eliminate jobs instead of creating them. At IBM, Subramanian was designing robots for use in automation. (He recently left the company.) Dunzo is working to build artificial intelligence that would eventually replace much of its operations staff. Wipro and Infosys, the IT companies that most symbolize Bangalore’s tech industry, replaced 8,200 human jobs last summer with software. Tej Pochiraju, the managing director of Jaaga Startup, which bills itself as India’s first co-working space, said the divide between engineers and laymen would only accelerate. “As things get more and more automated, technology and techies will become more godlike,” he said.

In a New Year’s letter to his employees, Infosys Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka wrote of “the tidal wave of automation and technology-fueled transformation that is almost upon us”—a choice of words that sounded more apocalyptic than utopian. A few weeks later a techie was murdered by a security guard on Infosys’s campus in Pune, about 500 miles northwest of Bangalore. The Hindustan Times warned about “a growing list of IT workers kidnapped, molested, raped, or killed on campus.” Although unrelated, Sikka’s letter and the crime coverage shared a certain anxiety: Tech could guarantee neither job security nor personal safety. The techie, the hero of the Indian economy, would never be as safe as he seemed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Story of India’s space program

 

 

India's first rocket launch became possible quite literally after divine intervention. The land which now houses India's famed Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, from where, in 1963, Indians watched their first rocket head for space, was originally a Catholic church.

So, how did a church become a space centre?

In the early 1960s, Dr Vikram Sarabhai selected a small fishing village called Thumba in Trivandrum as the ideal location for a rocket launching station. And the spot he had zeroed in as a potential launch site housed a church.

St Mary Magdalene Church was located on Earth's magnetic equator, an imaginary line where the Equatorial Electrojet (a narrow ribbon of current flowing eastward in the day time equatorial region of the ionosphere) exists. This had stirred Dr Sarabhai's interest.

So, one fine day, Dr Sarabhai and his colleagues went to speak to the then-bishop of Trivandrum, Rev Dr Peter Bernard Pereira, about acquiring the church.

That must have been an awkward conversation. It also culminated in a cliff-hanger. Instead of giving them a definite answer, Reverend Pereira, asked the scientist to attend the Sunday mass that week.

Among this group of scientists was Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, and he wrote about this particular Sunday mass in his book Ignited Minds: Unleashing The Power Within India.

This is what he writes the bishop told the congregation: "My children, I have a famous scientist with me who wants our church and the place I live for the work of space science and research. Science seeks truth that enriches human life. The higher level of religion is spirituality. The spiritual preachers seek the help of the Almighty to bring peace to human minds. In short, what Vikram is doing and what I am doing are the same - both science and spirituality seek the Almighty's blessings for human prosperity in mind and body. Children, can we give them God's abode for a scientific mission?"

Kalam then writes that there "was silence for a while followed by a hearty 'Amen' from the congregation, which made the whole church reverberate."

The necessary permissions were fetched, due paperwork done, and the villagers shifted to a different village that had its own brand new church. And on the garden before St Mary Magdalene Church, our first rocket launcher was build.

 

From St Francis's church to Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre

According to National Geographic, St Francis Xavier built a humble thatched-roofed building in 1544, which went on to become a concrete St Mary Magdalene Church by the 20th century.

History has it that the church got its name after some fishermen found a sandalwood statue of Mary Magdalene that had washed ashore.

Then, in the 1960s, St Mary Magdalene Church became Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. In his book, Kalam wrote that the prayer room became his first laboratory, and the bishop's room his drawing office.

It is said that the church's cattle shed was converted into the laboratory where the scientists worked. The main church building, of which nothing seems to have been demolished,went on to become a space museum.

In time to come, TERLS became Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). In fact, the roots of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), in a way, lie in this church too.

Rocket on a bicycle, launch-pad in a church

India's proud history of rocket science took its baby steps on a bicycle and a bullock cart. In order to be brought to the launch pad, parts of the NASA-made rocket, Nike-Apache, were carried on these vehicles, as shown below:

 

After much labour, on the eve of November, 21, 1963, Nike-Apache blasted off into space from the garden facing St Mary Magdalene Church.

The building, which bears church-like beauty of towers and bells, now houses a space museum, where you cannot walk in with your shoes on.

Once you're inside, you don't encounter an altar. Instead, you are faced with a fascinating array of rockets, satellites, and details of how church became a space centre.

Chaos for Cash

 

In its effort to bring out black money, the government overestimated  the efficiency of banks, and underestimated the time it will take to deliver new notes. Its now day 3 of the ban on high value currenty notes, and banks and ATMs have gone dry in the nation.

Meanwhile new generation plastic and e-cash startups have upped their ante, pushing new ads to market their services. And people are still converting cash into gold paying inflated rates.

The only good thing which happened to me was that Bangalore elevated tollway stopped charging their entry fees. So the tollways were free for all. And that lead to reduced traffic too.

I guess it will take at least a month to get fresh cash in circulation again.

Thankfully, cities like Bangalore had already gone majority cash-less. All supermarkets and most restuarants already accepted plastic money. In the wake of cash scarcity, they have reduced the minimum amounts required to make the transaction, and are letting people swipe cards for even Rs 50/-. Cab services which accepted cards and e-cash services had brisk business. But auto-drivers were left in the dark. There are talks of black marketeers charging upto 40% commission to exchange out the older notes in the system. There is also news of a person contacting the beggars-mafia to arrange for hard cash !

Somebody even made an Unboxing video of the new 2000 Rs/- note !

Sometime back I had read an article on gloomberg arguing why a cashless society cannot exist. I guess its author needs to take a second look at India.

Its a whole new world

 

I hate the open office configuration, what’s designed to facilitate communication sometimes leads to communication mayhem. Like today. The whole office floor was buzzing with bad news. The dual attack of bad news in the day. The biggest breaking news of this year.

One was the fact that Trump is leading in the US election results. And the other big bang was the Indian Government's decision to discontinue high denomination currency notes. And the third news was that the stock market was under attack , and the sensex was headed down.

When Election Day dawned, almost all the pollsters, analytics nerds and political insiders in the country had Hillary Clinton waltzing into the White House. Headed into Election Day, polling evangelist Nate Silver’s 538 website put Clinton’s odds at winning the White House at about 72 percent. By midnight, the site had more than flipped its odds making, giving Trump an 84 percent chance of winning.

This was the biggest 'error' statisticians had committed in centuries. It’s amazing how with all the latest analytics systems and big data and social media..and all those nonsense..they still got it wrong. By a huge margin.

I feel so bad for Stephen Colbert. And John Oliver. And Jimmy Fallon. And James Corden. And Trevor Noah. Even Bill Maher. And Jimmy Kimmel. The past many months, I have devoured their sketches and news and bits whole heartedly, knowing and trusting their hints that the Democrats would win. Here's hoping they are around for a lot more time.

Anyway, back to my office, it was clear there was cause for concern. A lot of Indian IT companies depend on US enterprises as clients for outsourced work. Trump and the republicans in power would mean its the end of it all. This could be end of Indian IT as we know it.

And back home, the incumbent government's struggle to contain blackmoney took a new turn when they announced the de-monetization of high value currency notes. Indian citizens now had 50 days to deposit all their de-monetized currency with banks. Keeping in mind there are over a billion citizens in the country, 50 days seems like too little time to get through it. But this short window is definitely required, to prevent people from converting all their ill-earned wealth to legal, 'white-money'. Its amazing how a decision of such high importance was kep top-secret till the Prime Minister got to personally announce it on an unscheduled address to the nation.

Kudos to the government for this ultra-quiet, sneaky, 'surgical strike'. This time, nobody is asking for proof.

Now just to be clear, no-one in the IT industry will have to worry about their wealth. It is probably the only industry to pay correct taxes upfront, with tax deducted right at the source. All IT employees are paid online, and they have their Form-16s and TANs and PANs to show. For once it turned out honesty indeed is the right policy to live by.

Historians are going to remember November 8th, 2016 as the day everything changed. The most unpredictable happened right in front of our eyes.

And no one saw it coming.

India’s bold and half baked move to stop BlackMoney

 

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced that the currency notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 denominations will not be legal tender beginning November 9. Prime Minister also added that all banks will remain closed for public work tomorrow. ‘Terror strikes at the innocent. Who funds these terrorists’ Across the border, our enemy uses fake currency and dodgy funds to sponsor terror - this has been proven repeatedly. The process of cash circulation is directly related to corruption in our country impacting the lower classes of our society. From midnight November 8 today, Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes are no longer legal tender,’ Prime Minister Modi said while addressing the nation.

‘You have 50 days (From November 10 to December 30) to deposit notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 in any bank or post office. Respite for people for the initial 72 hours. The government hospitals will accept old Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes till November 11 midnight,’ he added. Prime Minister Modi said notes of Rs. 2000 and Rs. 500 will be circulated soon.

‘The RBI has decided to limit the notes with higher value. There will be more purification the more we get support from you. Let’s continue the process of cleanliness and work together for successful completion of this initiative. We want to take this fight against corruption even ahead,’ he added. The Prime Minister further said that on November 9 and in some places on November 10, ATMs will not work.

Here are some imporant takeaways:

Less bang for your black bucks: Those with large amounts of large-denomination black money in cash will be hit hardest, since offloading this cash will become extremely difficult. Exchanging crores of rupees at banks will likely attract the attention of the taxman.

Less counterfeiting: These denominations were the most easily and widely counterfeited notes. Taking them out of circulation will eliminate a big source of fake notes.

Terrorism funding: A significant amount of terrorism was funded using counterfeit and/or high-denomination notes. This will also be hit badly.

Election funding: It is an open secret that elections in India are largely bankrolled by massive amounts of black money, typically in cash that are often used as direct bribes to voters. This spigot will now be shut off, disrupting the electoral system. The UP and Punjab elections will the first to face the brunt of this move.

Corruption: Most bribes across the system are typically paid in cash. While smaller amounts will not be affected, large amounts of bribes will now be limited, at least until the new denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 2000 are introduced in large numbers. But again, those will already accumulated cash will be hit hard.

India Flying

 

 

I didn't believe it, when Air India got into "Breaking News" announcing they made a profit. Because that is unbelievable. But then they did it again when they set a supposed "world record" for flying the longest non-stop flight. The news was first reported on Flightradar, and everyone else has simply copied over the content and reported it verbatim. And with the Indian government's new plan to make flying cheaper and affordable to Indians under their Udaan program, the focus is back on flying and planes.

Apparently, the government plans to cap the cost of 1-hour domestic flights to a certain amount. This will make it more affordable to the commonfolk (mango-men). But then I recalled reading another article which said that India already has the lowest prices for flying domestic !

Research by Kiwi.com, an online flight comparison site, states that the average cost per 100km to fly domestic in India is 3.25 USD !! And the low cost rate is actually lesser at 2.27 USD. And yes, currently that is the cheapest in the world. The most expensive country to fly is...UAE, with a rate of 105 USD per 100 kms. That’s about 50 times costlier.

Well this news changes everything we thought about flying in India. On one side, flyers kept complaining of hidden charges and 'convenience' fees on their flight tickets. On the other side, the airline companies complained that the cost of aviation fuel was extremely high, and that they were simply passing over that cost to the end customer, the passenger. So airline companies in India have been already providing the cheapest flights in the world in spite of these huge costs.

I hope this trend continues. India already has the cheapest telephone rates in the world, which is a mainstay of today’s living. Flying is still a distant dream for most Indians and I hope a few more of them can take to the skies, before all the Indian Airline companies get taxed to the ground.

Online Shopping ? Stay smart.

 

Online shopping is a rage nowadays, I see people looking up prices of watches to motorcycles on computers and smartphones. Everyone is searching for that elusive deal. Its the online version of window shopping. You know, when you are just comparing prices, but not really buying anything.

Turns out , there are apps which will help you do this window shopping , compare prices, and even alert you to other price drops in the category. In India, the extension called Buyhatke is the leader and the best. They have chrome extensions, which will turn active if you are at a shopping site, and show you price trends from the past. It works on Flipkart, Amazon, eBay  and many other sites too.

The extension automatically adds a price trend graph in a simple line graph on the page. Also tries to predict if it is a good decision to buy the product today.

Its amazing being able to see how they fluctuate the price of the same product over time. Here is a graph alerting me that the product on sale is actually  priced higher today than yesterday.

 

Here is how crazily the price fluctuates on some products. Its almost as if there was an earthquake a few days ago.

Also works on Amazon.

But the best feature is that it alerts you if the same product is available at a lower price somewhere else.

Now thats cool. It only calculates base price, and there might be an additional shipping charge.

Another extension you can use the Flipkart Advantage detector.  Flipkart does not metion on the grid view if the product has express shipping. This extension detects that and puts an icon on the product page if it can be delivered on the same day or next day. Here is has placed a red star on the first product.

 

Things have not been good for shopping sites in India. With the festival season coming up, there will surely be many deals for the customers coming in.

Be smart. And happy shopping !

Girl Power

 

What a month it was. Olympics was the number one topic for the whole month. Even now, I see people watching recordings of some of the olympic events. But for India, there was the great Irony.

Women athletes from India saved the nation’s face at the recently concluded 2016 Olympics at Rio. After all the promotions, and goodwill ambassadors and selfies, three girls stole the thunder and showed what sheer determination can do.

 

A news which was not widely reported was that squash player Deepika Palikkal took the Australian open, in the same weeks.

Squash, as I couldn’t-believe-it found out, is not part of the Olympics, but there is a huge campaign for it.

So that means Indian women athletes were winning accolades for the country, while back home, crime against women is rising. I find that highly ironical. In a country were free speech is oppressed, and patirachal rules are more powerful than the consitution, it was finally women who saved the country’s face. The male athletes on the other hand, were out in the knockouts, or were banned for doping.

Not sure how long the focus will be on these athletes. And thanks to their brave life choices, many more girls can dream of making a huge splash in the world of sports.

In a cricket crazy nation, it will only be till the next cricket match. Hope here things change for the better.

 

Electric vehicles in India

 

Last months’ terrible traffic jam and worsening climate got me thinking about greener modes of transport. What are the non-fossil fuels based transport avaiable to us Indians ? Turns out, not very much. Whatever options are available today are way more expensive and cumbersome than the simple petrol/diesel engine based vehicles. But still, there are quite a lot of options, the general public is not aware of them.

For instance, take electric bicycles. These are the standard pedal cycles, but with an additional electric motor which can be used to further the distance that can be covered. The only company currently seen selling such bikes is Hullikal, and the bikes are priced way high.

Around Rs 30,000/-. For this price, one can easily buy a second hand petrol engine bike. And this pricing is the biggest problem which will hamper early adoption of this novel new technology.

For the same price, or slightly more, one can buy a full fledged two wheeler, which looks like any one of those million scooters on the road. And it says it can travel double the distance.

The company every e-bike enthusiast is watching right now is Ather. They have promised to deliver a futuristic looking smart bike, with full integration to smartphones and gps. But this bike will be priced > Rs 75,000/-

But those few who can afford these vehicles , and their monthly electricity bills, and care for the planet, are surely buying and using them. In Bangalore, I see a lot of electric cars from Mahindra on the road. It was initially priced at ~7 lakhs, but now the price is down to  ~5 lakhs.

I didn’t know this, but it seems one can buy an electric sedan too.

 

Going green is definitely expensive. That and the non-availability of charging stations around town is going to slow down this even more.

Aug 7, 2016

Today I read this in my news.

It just proves that every state does not have the guts to implement rules which ensures saftety of its people. The no-helmet-no-petrol initiative was started some time back in some districts of Kerala state with immense success. Petrol bunk operators were asked to refuse fuel to two wheeler riders not wearing helmets. Soon other state governments started copying the initiative and decided to implement the law at a state level. But then came the opposition from the citizens and opposition parties. In some states, Public Interest Litigations were filed against the law, and in other states, people’s protests lead the government to drop the policy.

Just goes to confirm that Indians are lazy, but not concerned about safety.

Living in India is getting more expensive

 

Well, prices of things are always going up, but now the Indian citizen is getting crushed under a new set of taxes. After introducing the 0.5% Swachh Bharat Cess in November, the Union Finance Minister announced in this year’s Budget that the government would levy a Krishi Kalyan Cess to finance activities related to agriculture and build a fund for the welfare of the farmers. Indirect taxes and charges such as these are an important part of the government’s income from taxation. Of the Rs14.4 lakh crore ($213 billion) of taxes collected by the Indian government in the last financial year, 44.4% came from indirect taxes.

Meanwhile, prices of petrol and diesel were hiked on June 1. Petrol will become costly by Rs2.58 per litre and diesel by Rs2.26 a litre. This means transport costs will rise, affecting the prices of vegetables, fruits, milk and other food products, among others. To add to household woes, the cost of an LPG cylinder—used for cooking across the country—was also increased by Rs21.

Travelling in airconditioned buses will be costlier from today with the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) increasing its fare by 6%, thanks to union finance minister Arun Jaitley, who has imposed service tax on state-carriage AC buses. Not just tickets, daily and monthly passes will also cost more. Monthly passes of AC buses which operate within the city are likely to cost `135 more, and passes of AC buses to and from Kempegowda International Airport will cost `201.

What a fantastic time to be living in India. And the reality of all this is that after all these taxes and charges, nothing  is going to change in the country.

Thrissur is India’s chit fund capital

 

 

Kerala's banking sector had its roots in local 'kuris' and when RBI started regulating banks, their numbers came down from 163 to a mere handful by 1970s. However, during the same time, Kerala witnessed a mushrooming of kuri companies - especially in Thrissur, which could be called the chit fund capital of India as one among every six chit funds in India is from Thrissur.

Two decades ago, chit funds from Kerala had shifted their registered offices to other states as the state legislation was tough. "They first moved to Bengaluru and when Karnataka started implementing the Central Chit Funds Act, they shifted to Faridabad," said Mathew Puthukattukaren, director, Dharmmodayam, which was registered in 1919 as a company with the then Cochin state.

"Those companies operating out of Faridabad had opened a namesake office. According to local rules, they were able to register the companies under the Local Shops Act, just like any other shop," he said. This reached such a farcical level that few years ago a British newspaper Daily Mail had reported that a two-storey building in sector 7 of Faridabad was home to 130 chit funds from Kerala.

Once Haryana was brought under the central act in 2012, the exodus of registered offices reversed. According to the documents of the ministry of corporate affairs, by the end of October 2014, India had 5,836 chit fund companies and 2,148 were registered in Kerala. Thrissur had the maximum : 1,090 firms.

India Experienced Its Hottest Ever Recorded Temperature of 51C

 

It just got in here.