RE: Something that answers one of my questions

Hi Kiran,

I just have a line or two to describe my thoughts on the question you posed below…

It's like someone sitting on the top of a tree branch & hurriedly cutting it – without noticing the abyss underneath him/her… we are too moved the constant need to outperform us vis-à-vis the competition, that it hardly matters as to the means employed..  maybe it's like … "Ends justify means".. and hence, the means that we are using now-a-days, may result in "The End"

Something that answers one of my questions

I have gone through this small article in yesterday's ET that kind of gave an answer to my question. Actually when I started asking this question, I knew the answer but I thought if no one is thinking like me, then I could be wrong, so instead of going with opinion and solutions, I took this questions to many learned people. They give a wide range of answers and none of them satisfied me; may be I was looking for them to match the answer I have (my own bias), but then it doesn't matter. Now that someone published in the paper, I decided to make my opinion public by agreeing with this article and appreciating the article.

My Question was and still is: Is the current hunger for growth really necessary? If every corporation (incorporating the desires of individual) drives for more and more and keep learning from their failures and become more and more efficient and complex, what would it lead to? Can our Blue Planet support this hunger, can it sustain the man-made changes or will make it such changes that man cannot sustain? Now to the article:

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DEEP ECONOMY

Bill McKibben


FOR most of human history,the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch You could toss one stone and hope to hit both.But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest.That changes everything.Now,if youve got the stone of your own life,or your own society,gripped in your hand,you have to choose between them.Its More or Better.Given all that we know about topics ranging from the molecular structure of carbon dioxide to the psychology of human satisfaction,we need to move decisively to rebuild our local economies.These may well yield less stuff,but they produce richer relationships;they may grow less quickly,if at all,but they make up for it in durability.
Shifting our focus to local economies will not mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with markets.Markets,obviously,work.Building a local economy will mean,however,ceasing to worship markets as infallible and consciously setting limits on their scope.We will need to downplay efficiency and pay attention to other goals.We will have to make the biggest changes to our daily habits in generations and the biggest change,as well,to our worldview,our sense of what constitutes progress.The old realism an endless More is morphing into a dangerous fantasy.In the face of energy shortage,of global warming,and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be,I think weve started to grope for what might come next.And just in time.


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Let me know what you think about this.

Suggestion to Banks with online banking facility - HDFC, ICICI and others

I have sent the below mail to one of the banks and wanted to reproduce it in a public forum for the benefit of other banks.

Sub: Suggestion regarding cheque transaction management.

With the rise in usage of cash withdrawal from ATMs and payments/fund transfers through Internet Banking, customers (at least the salaried class and those who are well versed with online banking) are using cheques sparingly. But then these customers are the most prone to not doing the diligent part of cheque payments, which is maintaining the required amount till the time the cheque gets cleared.

I have a suggestion to your Bank to add value to its online internet banking service by helping customers overcome such issue and all the associated (Cheque returned for lack of funds, penalties thereof and reputation risk and the inconvenience in correcting the error) problems.

All the bank has to do is add a new service in the online banking service that can be called "cheque management." This service should work like this:

1. Whenever a customer issues a cheque, he/she can login to the online banking account and click on the cheque management service.
2. Fill the details of the cheque issued - name of the party, cheque number, amount to be paid etc.
3. Then click on the block cheque amount. After confirmation the said amount will get blocked from the customer's account and he/she will not be able to withdraw that amount from any means and the blocked amount will be used only for payment of the cheque indicated
4. In case there is any change in the cheque payment transaction, customer should be able to unblock the amount and do the necessary.

This should be only a voluntary, customer request based service and the Bank should not have any liability of any mistakes in amount blocked.

The information fed in the online account can be used to cross verify the cheque presented and can be used to avoid frauds too.

I would be delighted if the merits of this suggestion is discussed and implemented in a suitable manner. In case any further details are required, feel free to call me (your customer care has my number - hehehe)

Thanks and Regards
Kiran Kumar A

What makes an ocean

I always had a pessimistic view about the CSR initiatives of companies. So when I got a mail from our Branding group to send them a list of CSR initiatives taken up in our vertical, I simply wrote a run-of-the-mill mail to other locations to forward me the details of initiatives taken up them. I just got three points, first one is about a medical camp conducted at some village where our project is being implemented - I thought what's so great about it, next point is about a 5000 rs donation to CRY by a group of employees, I felt that these are better than me, may be they didn't do anything themselves but at least they believed someone to do some useful work and the last one was the most interesting - as a part of our project implementation, we would need access to certain place and we pay crop compensation to the farmer whose crop may get damaged in that process, in one such case, the farmer is a old man and had a paralysis stroke, he got the usual crop compensation, which might be better than what he would have made from the crop (owing to the drought conditions), the story actually starts here, the two young engineers who were involved in this activity decided to go the extra mile, they discovered that the farmer wanted to buy a pair of oxen with the untimely money he got but was not in a condition to visit a market, negotiate and buy the ox, so these guys helped the farmer in identifying an excellent pair of oxen and then did all the negotiations and bought the oxen. When I saw the photograph, somewhere in my heart I felt very good, I surely have a soft corner for agriculture and cattle owing to my childhood in a remote village but then who doesn't like agriculture and who wouldn't appreciate the beauty of the pair of oxen in the photograph. Great job friends, small drops of good deeds such as these do create the ocean of positive energy and I am writing this post just to add another drop to that ocean


Kiran Alla

Twist or a turn

My quest has led me to a new route. It could be a twist or a simple turn, not sure at this moment even as I start feeling better. But why write these thoughts on this blog - is it an attempt to project myself, is it to gain acceptance from some known and some unknown readers; I know that these are embedded in my actions and whenever I realize it, I would stop writing my thought junk on the blog but then the second principle that I want to implement is making me write this post.

For quite sometime, since the time I became independent, I have been following the principle that I will do no act that will harm others (at least to the extent my knowledge/wisdom goes) and I will not allow or keep quiet if someone is harming me. This has been the guiding principle for me to channelize my energies and to reconcile my actions at the end of the day. The second principle, about which I have been aware for quite sometime but not been practicing as rigorously as the first one, is that my happiness is not something that is limited just to me, it is linked to so many others and other things that if I just focus on myself, I would just remain independent and will be living in an island and would be going in circles.

Finally after about 12 years of experimentation and intermittent implementation I have decided to adopt the second principle in all my actions. Apart from not doing harm to others and not allowing others to harm me, from now on, I am going to spend time in evolving myself and others around me, with the clarity that only effort is mine while result depends on many other things. I have now decided to fully adopt the principle of "Interdependence" that Stephen R Covey wrote about in his Seven Habits book. Not that I have not practiced it but from now on I will make a conscious effort to make every action a beneficial interdependent action.

I would keep sharing my experiences and would greatly appreciate any inputs, reflections.

Dynamic websites

My blogging has surely become quite intermittent. This is not because I have stopped having anything to share but because I am trying multiple things but my blog is still like my native place. I have been trying to bring whatever I am doing elsewhere to this blog, so that the regular don't miss seeing my ramblings (those who get used don't care if it is good or bad, I presume they just need the dose).

I would like to share this idea that has been coming back again and again in recent days and after seeing Firefox launching its Personas, I felt it is good time to share this idea.

I keep visiting certain websites on a regular basis, for example - my personal mail, a news site, my bank site, a certain professional body and so on. All these websites are well designed and look great for the first few times you visit them but after sometime they start getting boring - same color, same fonts, same logos.

I started thinking wouldn't it be wonderful if they make the website look dynamic not just customize/personalize. More and more we are living (spending time) on the internet and since the marginal cost going dynamic is small (I am assuming this here), it would be nice if we can make internet more like the Wonderland that Alice went to. This will provide opportunity for the creative part of us to come out on a larger canvas and keep life (internet) more interesting.

Google has been doing this on its home page and I think people like the surprise element of that without loosing the basic nature. I mean to say that websites can become dynamic without changing their basic character/identity. I can try this on my blog itself but then I am not that savvy and even though I tried to get some help earlier, not much actually happened.

I want this message to mainly reach ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, ADB, WRI, different sites hosted on nic.in, even gmail. Let's see if someone is reading

What to do with the extra money FM gave us - Save or Spend?

After a long time, our Finance Minister gave relief to all of us in the salaried class. By increasing the tax slabs and adding another 20k tax free investment in Infra Bonds, he gave 51000 extra money in hand (if your taxable income is 8 lakhs or more) and 6000 reduction in tax payable if you chose to invest 20k in infra bonds.

 

Splurge or Save will be the big question. I hope that I am correct in saying that my reader group has more or less reached a certain maturity level in our careers and that we are all cash positive and we expect to be on a growth path for few more years. My further discussion would be based on this assumption.

 

What to do with the extra income - splurge or save? Before you choose to decide on the correct answer, let me take the fizz out of the question by adding that there is no single correct answer. The plausible answer is "it depends."

 

One has to live in the current moment otherwise there is no life, you would either have memories or dreams. Memories and dreams are not totally unnecessary - you get cheered up when you recall a happy moment and will get motivated when you start thinking about a dream, in fact they are part of present but alas memories and dreams cannot feed us nor can they make things happen. You have to make things happen in present so that you can realise your dreams in future look back at these as past memories.

 

For me, Money is a kind of measurement. Measurement of various things - value, utility, energy, requirement, needs etc. Of these, utility is the most subjective one that impacts our view about money and all other earthly things. What is this utility, then? Utility is supposed to be the happiness (another subjective word) derived by the individual by doing a certain task, physical, mental or emotional and disutility is the unhappiness or discomfort.

 

Utility, as can be observed easily by any one of you independently, can be derived from various things - eating, sleeping, playing, watching a movie, possessing a rare thing, interacting with someone, caring or being cared by someone, reading a book or watching a nice movie, spending time with someone you like, mostly categorizable as satiating different types of hungers and certain abstract things such as meditation, prayer etc. Sometimes utility and disutility go hand in hand and in such situations we think about the net effect and decide whether to do it or not.

 

End of the day, all of us want our day to be a day in which we have gained some utility and thereby experience life positively. If, on a given day, all you experience is disutility, you would wish that you were better dead than alive. What I am arriving at is that on a daily basis we keep searching for utility like a bee searches for honey - searching has some disutility but finding what we want has greater utility, so we are ready to experience some disutility to gain utility later.

 

 

One of the first steps to make life better - is to identify the things that give us more and more utility. But as money is designed to represent the aspects that have common utility to all human beings, it generally can buy things that all human beings can recognize - you can have tasty food, travel to a exotic destination, but some entertainment, indulge in a pleasure hobby etc etc. And the utility money can buy is the easier one though it may not last long and since the disutility of doing the work to gain money and utility that is gained by spending such money are disconnected we never know if it was worth it (disutility of earning money vs the utility gained by spending money)

 

While we need the utility that can be bought by money to live, there are many other things not related to money but can be done if you are alive. My take is that we should keep using money to buy those things that we need to live - food, house, clothing etc but learn to see the real utility. Wearing a 2000 rs branded shirt may make you feel better and superior to a roadside pedestrian but if you look at the real utility, the value of things that 2000 rs can buy will look like a mountain compared to the branded shirt. You can spend 500 rs at a multiplex but if you make effort and plan and meet few friends for a sport, it will give you far more happiness. So learn to understand yourself and your utility for various things. One of the most important activities I have done as a human being is having good friends. Human being is supposed to be the most evolved being on Earth at least in my conscious and spending time with a mentally evolved human is the best thing I can do after my basic hungers are fulfilled. While fulfilling hunger is necessary you have understand the hunger first, why do you desire something so much is a difficult question to answer but you can keep trying.

 

When you save, you are postponing consumption of things that money can buy and it means fulfillment of someone elses utility. If you have got enough utility for the day, then your postponement of that little utility not cause disutility. Thus right amount of saving is a zero utility/disutility activity and knowing this "right amount" is critical.

 

To conclude, it is a good time to do a review because you have that little extra money in your hand (about 10%) without any additional effort. You are not sacrificing anything and therefore you need not feel bad and decisions that are taken when one is stable would be good decisions. Take a good decision

 

I hope I gave you some good utility in writing this mail and sharing my thoughts with such good friends is a great utility for me. If you want to discuss anything personally, feel free to get in touch with me.