“Acha, what does panja mean?” – asks my daughter of three
Panja means 5, I say, slightly confused about what might be the context

She is silent for a moment and then asks “what does basinda mean?”
Now am lost. Hmm… I don’t know. Where did you hear that?

“Teacher told us.”
Basinda?
“Yeah..”
What did she say? Am thinking this must be a name in some story.
“She was singing. Panja-basinda-gujara-thamaratha”

Well, that basinda… *weighing my option between making up something or explaining the concept of states to her*

Late Quarter or Early Mid?!!

What the freak was I thinking on April 02!!!

First time in 11 years am finding myself working 100+ hours a week. Not a moment to sit back and think what went wrong. A client who escalates even QA build breaks to their CIO is not helping either.

No new lessons on a quick reflection…

• The 9-lady one month myth is really a myth. Don’t try
• Integrating with 5 systems and 53 services in god-knows-how-many technologies need at least couple of weeks of integration time
• A team who hasn’t worked together before needs at least a month to gel. Don’t attempt a 12-week dev cycle with such a team

Well, there is one new lesson… every time you refuse to learn, it gets harder the next time.

And a principle that need to be reinforced – you’ve every right to put yourself through this shit, but not 40 other people who were not part of that decision.

My attempt at doing a cartoon

Am not a fan of armed struggle or terrorism. And I nearly hate essays by Arundhati Roy. This one was hard to ignore or hate though: Walking With The Comrades

It is hard to realistically align with Roy’s tactics of painting Maoists as angels. But then, she has a very valid question – what alternative should be advised to these people?

This vast population of poor people is caught between the Maoists (who is ill with a paranoia of establishments of all kind) and the government (which has people capable of erroneous decisions and corruption, to say the least) and corporates (who measure success only by money). It is hard to believe the amount they get paid for work, and easier to see why they get drawn to organisations like the Naxals. They had a strike to raise payment for a certain work from 3 paise to 10 paise, and the people not paying reasonable wages are multi-billion giants!

This is one part in the article, among many, that left me disturbed.

See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out

This police officer’s sarcastic way of putting it gives a fair idea of what the conflict is.

Am missing not being able to be with family as much time as should be
Am feeling bad about not being able to go on those drives for which the new Scorpio is
Am cribbing about my 14-hour work days

But then… know what? Am feeling great. After MEC (Microsoft Enterprise Cube) this is the first time am totally involved in a project that am in that floating state all the time, where reality mixes with the virtual. And starts having visuals like Food<Dosa> : IFood<T> looking at your breakfast.

Feeling good about doing what I enjoy doing
That sort of explains why am away from here for so long.

Assume you’re doing a huge project
You detail it to levels of complexity that can’t be handled
Spend millions and develop it over couple of years
Spend more millions and maintain it for an year

Then comes realisation… this can’t go on!
So you decide to scrap it completely to save the millions you would otherwise spend maintaining it.

Now we make a plan to use a new tool and fewer millions
Whom do you bring in to envision and plan that? Whom do you trust to do it right this time?
The same team that totally messed it up during the previous attempt, of course!
After all they have the “context”.

Are we acting naive or really are, to assume a tool would make all the difference!!!

Disclaimer: This is completely a fictional case study, not resembling anything done or to be done

Went to a workshop on water related issues last Sunday, 06 Dec at SJR Redwoods, Bangalore. Did expect the session to be informative, but was pretty sure the topic would be dull and might even border on boring. Must admit that ApartmentAdda and Rain Water Club did a splendid job of putting together an interesting and fun seminar. Those were the best utilized four hours in recent times for me. Here is a snapshot of my take-aways from the workshop. For a much more detailed account, please go here.

We started off with a handful of facts by Narahari from BWSSB. The key takeaways for me from this session were these

• Primary source for water for BWSSB is Cauvery
• Cauvery can support BWSSB’s expansion plans till 2012 only, beyond which there simply is no water available
• Currently BWSSB caters to around 60% of the city’s demand of 1500 MLD, the rest being groundwater (via borewell, tanker)
• Groundwater levels of Bangalore are fast depleting

All that basically underlined one fact that if we the residents of this city didn’t act – and act fast – it’ll be chaos in around 5 to 6 years from now. Most apartment complexes are already realising this, with water bill running to huge amounts.

Once we were all scared, the initialization part was over . Then came the solution part where BIOME (the commercial wing of RWC) presented us with the importance of doing Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) and various methods to do recharge or reuse. Some of the points presented were

• If you go verrrrry deep, you can be sure to hit lava but not necessarily water
• Water tables are replenished over several years and if we exploit at rates higher than replenishment, the 1200 ft borewell is not going to help
• One way to help the underground shallow and deep water tables is by recharging it with rain water
• For Bangalore, the wells for recharge purpose should be around 20 ft deep
• Bangalore receives 3000 MLD rain (on average) for 59 days in an year. If we take BWSSB’s estimate of 1500 MLD demand that the city has, the rainfall is enough to cater to 4 months of city’s demand (theoretical math, but indicative)

The way I look at this, it is not a doomsday message. It is a very positive message on how pretty simple things and reasonable investments can ensure us water safety for some more time to come.

Probably if all of us do RWH the chaos date will get pushed from 2015 to 2025, but it alone can’t do miracles and be an eternal solution. The most important thing is awareness about water being a limited resource (in its potable, piped form) and to use it judiciously and reuse to the extent possible. Sewage treatment related awareness was discussed in this light. Mr. Ranganathan did not mince words while pointing out state of the city in this regard. Below are some of the things discussed.

• Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) in most apartments and layouts are not operational
• STPs are expected to discharge water good enough for reuse, with acceptable COD/BOD
• With a dual-piping system we should be able to use this for tasks like cleaning cars, flushing, gardening
• Reuse this way can cut your water demand to almost half
• Purification methods like RO/Softening are over-hyped and not necessary in most cases
• RO systems (especially small domestic ones) have a very high water wastage rate

The reassuring part was that certain apartments and layouts have implemented RWH and STP systems very effectively and has seen measurable improvement in their water levels. This was something that inspired the rest of us to implement/enhance our RWH/STP systems.

The inevitable question of ROI did come up. Apparently the ROI will be between 3 to 8 years depending on your alternative options for water. The punch-line of the day came because of this discussion though… that in case of water we should be worried more about “Return on Lack of Investment” where sewage gets into your drinking water in the absence of proper STP investment

Transferred my loan recently from Deutsche Postbank (formerly BHW Home Finance) to Union Bank. This is an account of the experience and a few mistakes from the past that were given attention to.

Reason to Change
The rates went up with the market but never came down with the market. To bring it down you need to pay 1% of your outstanding amount! What this meant to my loan is that my loan tenure went up from 20 years to 26 years! When I did some math, there was this other bank where I can pay 20% extra EMI per month and finish off my loan in less than 10 years.

Finding a Bank
In the process of getting the loan changed, there were many banks we thought of. Here is a list of where all we went and why that bank was not continued with. Some banks were not even visited due to feedback from colleagues/friends who has a loan from there.

Not considered due to bad feedback.

1. ICICI – High interest rates for existing customers
2. HDFC – High interest rates and pre-closure charges
3. IDBI – Relatively much better feedback, but was scared by the reviews on above two as this too is perceived to be in the same league

In short, we felt it was better to avoid so-called new generation banks.

Good feedback, but we had certain difficulties

1. State Bank (SBI, SBT, SBM, etc) – They have enough business without much marketing or reaching out and hence are not very keen to be proactive. Not really an ideal situation for someone who doesn’t have a month to dedicate on a loan approval.
2. Bank of Baroda – Well-behaved staff and willingness to help. However, my house being less than 2 years old, they had certain restrictions on re-evaluating the property.
3. Corporation Bank – Every time you submit the bunch of documents they require, these people will come up with a fresh list. Still the old-world banker who thinks he is funding you from his pocket.

In short, a good place to start is by making a list of nationalised banks who are making an attempt to be customer-friendly.

Evaluating the Banks/Offers

• Interest Rate: of course the number one concern. Look for anyone who is offering a competitive fixed rate for initial few years.
• BPLR: Talk to your contact person at the bank and understand what their Benchmark Prime Lending Rate is. Also ask them if they have multiple PLRs (say, different ones for home loans). Also ask them how much high their BPLR (or teh PLR that affects you) has historically been from the RBI Repo Rate. Avoid the banks with multiple PLRs and a high home loan PLR.
• Pre-payment: Find out how easy it is to make a pre-payment and upto what percent of outstanding you can make a pre-payment without any penalty. For example, there are banks that allow pre-payments via EFT from your online account and also allows you to pre-pay upto 90% of your outstanding in any year without charges.
• Pre-closure: Find out what the pre-closure charges are, in the event that you are closing the loan before tenure.
• Interest Calculation: Find out if the bank has a daily, monthly or quarterly reducing interest calculation. Most ethical banks have a daily reducing calculation (which means if you make an extra payment today you stop paying interest for it starting today – not starting the start of next month or quarter)

Considering the above facts, the bank that best suited my requirements was Union Bank of India. They have an 8.5% fixed interest for the next 3 years (floating thereafter), a single BPLR, pre-payment option through EFT and a very friendly and helpful bunch of people. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised to see how a bunch of inspired individuals can transform a nationalised bank! Please leave a comment if you would like to contact these gentlemen, and I would be glad to send you the details (Note: This is NOT an affiliate program).