Red Herring meets CEO Ramadorai

Tata Consultancy Services' CEO steered his company to the top of the pack in India. Now his challenge is to face global majors IBM and Accenture.

If India is the crown jewel of outsourcing destinations, Tata Consultancy Services is the company spearheading this movement. As the largest Indian outsourcing company in terms of revenues and profits, TCS has become a force that is challenging global firms such as IBM, Accenture, and EDS.

In March, TCS became the first of the Indian outsourcers to cross the $2-billion revenue mark. For fiscal year 2004-2005, TCS' revenue reached $2.24 billion and its net income was $512 million. When the Mumbai-based company went public on the Indian stock markets in August 2004, shares were oversubscribed 7.8 times and the $1.2-billion IPO become the second largest in Asia that year.

S. Ramadorai started working in 1971 at the then-fledgling company as a programmer after completing a master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Despite lucrative opportunities in the United States, Mr. Ramadorai returned to his home country to join what was then just about the only IT company around.

Since taking over as CEO in 1996, Mr. Ramadorai has led TCS through massive changes to become one of the leading IT companies worldwide. TCS is part of one of the largest Indian conglomerates, the TATA Group, which includes markets that cover energy, telecommunications, financial services, chemicals, and engineering and materials.

In September, TCS secured the largest-ever deal by an Indian outsourcer to provide application support and enhancements to Dutch bank ABM Amro; the work will generate $247 million in revenues over five years. In mid-October, TCS made another big move by entering the U.K. life insurance and pensions industry with a 12-year, $847-million contract with the Pearl Group. And in November, TCS bought Chilean outsourcing company Comicrom for $23 million.

Mr. Ramadorai is also extensively involved in the academic world, and is on the corporate advisory boards at the University of Southern California 's Marshall School of Business and several institutions in India. Earlier this year, Mr. Ramadorai was appointed chairman of Nasscom, India 's influential software trade association; his mandate is to drive initiatives to spread technology nationwide.

However, TCS faces challenges in the form of increased competition from smaller Indian players as well as Chinese companies, and still lags behind global players like IBM and Accenture. On a recent visit to the United States, Mr. Ramadorai fielded questions from Red Herring about the Indian IT environment, and how he plans to compete with the global giants.

Q: How does TCS plan to overtake global players such as IBM and Accenture?

A: We build scale.This year we plan to add about 13,000 people and [the total] are going to be 60,000 people by the end of March 2006. One dimension is the number of people, but we need to be very clear what we mean by going forward. Growth without profitability doesn't make sense. Growth with the right margins is very fundamental and we'll be picking the right kind of opportunities for us to grow in the places that will give us margins.

Q: TCS is facing significant competition from smaller, upstart Indian players such as BirlaSoft, Larsen & Toubro, and Bharti Telecom—how do you plan to face them?

A: TCS has been in the business for the last 36 years and has an enormous amount of competencies and client base. The total outsourcing out of India is still less than 3 percent than the total of IT spend in the world, so we still have a lot of upside in the game.

While there may be a number of other players that are emerging—which I believe must be necessary as the chairman of Nasscom, because we want to build an industry rather than one company—I think each of these smaller ones must find their own niche and find their opportunities for growth.

Q: How do you intend to grab the best talent in India, where there is a huge entrepreneurial wave catching on with all the startups and VC funding?

A: The TCS brand and the TATA brand, how it builds excellence in people and the kind of opportunity we give, is a very natural attraction. Secondly, we also have an enormous amount of innovation in the company where entrepreneurial culture and spirit is encouraged, a lot like idea generation and building a small niche product or service.

Thirdly, we have participated in funding some of the startup initiatives within the company and we ourselves act as a VC at times. Finally, we partner with some of these VC companies extensively because today startup companies with core technology will not see the market unless it is part of a solution. So some of these startups see us as a great system integrator to take them to market.

Q: The top management owns about 80 percent of TCS and employees hold very little. Is that likely to change?

A: The change came about when we went public in August 2004 and we gave stock grants to a number of people as well as cash for people to buy the stocks that were allocated to employees. Going forward, we still continue to give cash rewards but we will look at various ways as we see it necessary. If that is an option program that needs to be put in place, we will, so we are completely open and flexible.

Q: How do you see consolidation playing out in India 's IT industry?

A: Consolidation will always happen and inorganic growth can always happen. TCS acquired CMC about four years ago, now we are integrating and merging Tata InfoTech, and we entered joint ventures with airline companies like Singapore Airlines and Swissair. Finally, we bought a captive entity of insurance company back office called Phoenix Global in Bangalore, which brought in about 500 people. When you add up all of these we have almost added up 7,000 people inorganically, plus the Pearl initiative is going to bring another 950 people. We are talking about almost about 8,000 people coming into [the company] in an inorganic manner. It's a big deal—few companies have done these kinds of things out of India.

Q: TCS has been rooted in a family-owned environment—is there rigidity in the company that could impede its ability to become a big global player?

A: The Tatas were never family-owned because if you look at the historical significance of the group itself, it is completely professionally managed and the family holding is not even 2 percent of the total.

Family ownership is disappearing in India, not just in the IT services but in any part, because the next generations of the work force who want to run these companies are spreading, the companies and professional management is coming into place, and that's what we are witnessing in India. Changes are happening faster than we all believe.

Q: When is TCS planning to float American depository receipts in the stock market, if at all?

A: I can't make any prediction on when it will happen, how it will happen, and whether it will happen. But we always said on the IPO road shows that it was the beginning of a journey by the first dilution, by the listing in the Indian stock exchanges, so we will view this in the right context and the right opportunities and certainly consider it.

Q: So sometime soon

A: We don't rule out anything. We don't have any plans, or any decision on what we are going to do.

Q: What are some of the trends in the software and services space in India?

A: Open source is getting a lot of traction and attention. The second one is clearly the distributed computing and distributed infrastructure because of the communications link availability and its usage beyond urban areas in rural areas through a kiosk and a service-based model. Some states like Andhra Pradesh have partnered with TCS to create a portal to provide citizen services as a joint venture.

Q: Where do you think India stands against China?

A: China is absolutely clear that they want to grow in the globalization of IT services and software. They have a fairly long way to go, not only because of the language skills but also to migrate from a hardware mindset to a software mindset. India has a natural advantage where they have been in the software game for a long time. So the potential innovation that we can do in software is our biggest opportunity, and we will still focus on the commoditized types of services like [business process outsourcing]. So China will find its own position in the world, but at the end of the day it will not be at the cost of India or vice versa.

If we want to participate in the Chinese domestic market, we have to build local competencies. We view China as a market, as a competitor, as a source of talent to address external markets, and to service multinational companies. That's the way India will have to play in the Chinese markets.

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Hell and Heaven !!

One day while walking down the street a highly successful Human Resources Manager was tragically hit by a bus and she died. Her soul arrived up in heaven where she was met at the Pearly Gates by St.Peter himself.
"Welcome to Heaven," said St. Peter. "Before you get settled in though, it seems we have a problem. You see, strangely enough, we’ve never once had a Human Resources Manager make it this far and we're not really sure what to do with you."
"No problem, just let me in," said the woman.
"Well, I'd like to, but I have higher orders. What we're going to do is let you have a day in Hell and a day in Heaven and then you can choose whichever one you want to spend an eternity in."
"Actually, I think I've made up my mind, I prefer to stay in Heaven", said the woman
"Sorry, we have rules..." And with that St. Peter put the executive in an elevator and it went down-down-down to hell. The doors opened and she found herself stepping out onto the putting green of a beautiful golf course. In the distance was a country club and standing in front of her were all her friends? Fellow executives that she had worked with and they were well dressed in evening gowns and cheering for her.
They ran up and kissed her on both cheeks and they talked about old times. They played an excellent round of golf and at night went to the country club where she enjoyed an excellent steak and lobster dinner. She met the Devil who was actually a really nice guy (kind of cute) and she had a great time telling jokes and dancing. She was having such a good time that before she knew it, it was time to leave. Everybody shook her hand and waved goodbye as she got on the elevator.
The elevator went up-up-up and opened back up at the Pearly Gates and found St.Peter waiting for her. "Now it's time to spend a day in heaven," he said. So she spent the next 24hours lounging around on clouds and playing the harp and singing. She had great time and before she knew it her 24 hours were up and St. Peter came and got her.
"So, you've spent a day in hell and you've spent a day in heaven. Now you must choose your eternity," The woman paused for a second and then replied, "Well, I never thought I'd say this, I mean, Heaven has been really great and all, but I think I had a better time in Hell."
So St. Peter escorted her to the elevator and again she went down-down-down back to Hell. When the doors of the elevator opened she found herself standing in a desolate wasteland covered in garbage and filth. She saw her friends were dressed in rags and were picking up the garbage and putting it in sacks. The Devil came up to her and put his arm around her.
"I don't understand," stammered the woman, "yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a country club and we ate lobster and we danced and had a great time. Now all there is a wasteland of garbage and all my friends look miserable."

The Devil looked at her smiled and told...

“Yesterday we were recruiting you, today you're an Employee. . .”

Lalu didn't do anything. Will Nitish?

Winds of change have blown across the landscape of Bihar. With Lalu Prasad Yadav's 15-year era having come to an end, it is time for a new beginning. Or is it?

A week after Nitish Kumar took over the helm of affairs in the state, there are expectations galore from the man who started his career along with Lalu, under Jayaprakash Narayan's socialist movement.

From bringing back law and order to the state, the engineering graduate-turned-Chief Minister also has to deal with Bihar's falling fortunes. Apart from resurrecting the state's economy, he also has to restore a sense of peace and calm.

For a state that has been mired in an abyss of absolute lawlessness and hit rock bottom economically, the climb will be a tough one and Kumar will have to start from scratch.

Do the people of Bihar draw confidence from Lalu’s successor? Is Nitish the man to do all of that? Is it at all possible? What people of Bihar want to get done in their home state? These are questions which will get answered in near future.

The change of guard in Bihar is definitely great. It is a huge victory for the people of Bihar and having actively participated in the polls, One can understand the sense of elation.

It also shows that the mandate was never with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the poll results are a rejoinder to the fact that free and fair elections are quite possible in Bihar. This is just the beginning of a new, changed Bihar.

The new CM has to start everything from scratch –it’s difficult but possible. Politics, infrastructure, economics, social disorder –Nitish Kumar has a lot on his agenda. Bihar has been in a state of complete disarray over the past 15 years, which has been a period of complete misrule and non-development.

While Lalu had the mandate to work it out, he couldn't do anything for the state. Kumar will have to woo investment to the state in order to ensure that all those who had left the state in search for employment and a better future come back. Although it’s a coalition government, it will work if they have their house in order.

In business salesmanship, the consumer is the king. Likewise, in a democracy it is the people’s verdict, given freely and fairly which ultimately, is the ruler and the results reflect this.

The time for changeover was absolutely necessary. Large sections of people were yearning for social respect and prestige. They had also started clamoring for betterment in terms of facilities and availing new opportunities to better their economic standards.

The new government will have to beef up law and order, development of infrastructure and governance. However, law and order alone can’t resurrect Bihar's falling fortunes.

Kumar also has to stress on development and economic growth and there has to be a judicious mix of stick and carrot with preference between the two varying depending upon prevailing situation and circumstances.

Coalition governments reflecting a broad consensus of different ideologies and programmes, often suffer from the disadvantage of conflicting priorities even if a common minimum programme is in place. As long as that doesn’t happen to this government, things should be fine.

Since people have chosen him, it’s a welcome change. Although it’s too early to comment anything, Kumar looks promising.

The overall situation has to improve as the present state is not very good. There are lots of challenges ahead of him and he has to start from the basics. In terms of education, infrastructure, investment, Bihar has a long way to go, compared to other states.

I have spent my formative years in Bihar and I know that a change was definitely required. Kumar seems like a capable and deserving candidate who can revamp the situation in Bihar, which over the years has gone from bad to worse.

As long as the government has its priorities in order, there’s no reason a coalition government won’t work. Even at the Centre, there has been a successful coalition government. I can now hope that the bumpy roads in north Bihar, where my grandparents live will be a thing of the past.

Source: TOI, 1st December

Planning to visit Bihar? Check out this.

TCS to Support Joburg's New S/w Engineering Centre

An agreement was signed on 24 November 2005 between Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global software services and consulting company and the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) at Wits University. The agreement will bring specialist software engineering lecturers from India to the JCSE over the next two years. Prof Barry Dwolatzky, Academic Director of the JCSE, says "Bringing these lecturers to South Africa will make a significant contribution towards the development of high-level skills in the local software development sector."

The JCSE was launched in May this year as a partnership between Wits University, the City of Johannesburg and over 20 companies, including TCS, IBM, Microsoft, Unisys and FNB. Prof. Dwolatzky says, "TCS has a great deal of experience and expertise in training world class software engineers. The company's corporate training academy, in Thiruvananthapuram in the South of India, trains thousands of TCS recruits from across the globe. Today TCS boasts of a 54,000 strong team of software consultants and it is this centre that makes this training possible. The lecturers that will be brought to South Africa will come from this academy. It is really exciting that TCS has agreed to share this expertise with us. They will support the JCSE's educational programmes aimed at promoting best practice in software engineering and creating a pool of talent that would service the needs of our country".

Mr N. Chandrasekaran, Executive Vice President of TCS says "TCS is proud of its association with the University of the Witwatersrand and with the City of Johannesburg through the JCSE initiative. I am sure that the JCSE, in association with the industries in the ICT sector, would be able to realise its vision to create a local talent pool that would enable South Africa's capacity to deliver world class software".

TCS was among the first Indian software companies to enter South Africa, in 1995. The company implemented the STRATE system at the Johannesburg Securities Exchange, has worked on numerous projects in the banking and government sectors including Barclays, FNB, SABC and is implementing an ERP system at Wits.

The agreement will be signed for TCS by Mr N. Chandrasekaran, Executive Vice President and Head, Global Operations, who is visiting South Africa, and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, Prof Loyiso Nongxa, for the JCSE. This contribution from TCS is worth over R2 million, making it a "Gold Sponsor" of the JCSE.

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TCS partners with SAP in South Africa

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global provider of IT and consultancy services, announced its partnership with SAP AG in South Africa. The agreement was signed between TCS Limited and Systems Applications Products (Africa) (Proprietary) Limited, a subsidiary of SAP.

The combination of SAP's platform innovation and TCS' pioneering Networked Delivery Model and Software Quality Excellence will provide customers in South Africa unparalleled business agility and enable them to significantly enhance the value of their IT investments. Using its proven and robust software delivery methodology, TCS has built numerous tools and proprietary assets around SAP platforms. These have led to accelerated customer-centric solutions, reduced time-to-market and significant cost savings.

The partnership in South Africa is for several key initiatives with SAP, reflecting the strategic nature of the relationship between the two companies. TCS will also leverage its manufacturing and mining experience globally to work closely with SAP in the South African market.

Mr. Maphum Nxumalo (SAP South Africa - Director Strategic Business Development) in his address said, "It was indeed a pleasure to welcome an organization like TCS to the South African SAP Partner community and SAP South Africa was looking forward to working closely with TCS."

Speaking on the occasion, TCS EVP and Head of Global Sales and Operations, Mr. N Chandra, said - "TCS has aggressive growth plans for the Middle East and Africa regions and as part of this strategy, we want to cement our global alliances though local partnerships. TCS and SAP are natural global partners and this agreement is an extension of our joint commitment to the South African market."

About TCS' SAP Practice:

TCS has cumulative SAP project experience of over 4000 person years. Over two-thirds of TCS consultants have more than 4 years of SAP experience. TCS's SAP practice operates in North America, UK, Europe, India, Singapore and Australia with dedicated solution centers. TCS has strong, dedicated Industry Practices that are powerful repositories of domain knowledge, gleaned from work done around the globe. This ensures better understanding of requirements and successful implementations by incorporating best practices, complementing SAP's own vertical alignment of solutions. TCS's SAP practice has a presence in the SAP Partner Port at Walldorf, Germany to ensure synergy in operations with SAP AG.

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A Hindustan Times exclusive interview with CEO

TCS has a market cap of over $16.5 billion and yet it is acquiring small companies of less than $50 million. Where do these acquisitions fit into your global delivery model?

We are doing this by design. The acquisitions are meant to scale up the global delivery model. Size is not important. The important aspect for an acquisition is what value addition does it bring to the table in terms of domain knowledge, geography or its clientele. We have categorized six verticals or bubbles in TCS — IT services, business process outsourcing (BPO), engineering and industrial solutions, package enabled solutions, consulting and infrastructure services.

Going forward, one has to separate between voice and transaction based services which is why we divested from voice (Intelenet) before the IPO. Using technologically intensive modules, the future is in platform based, domain based, transformational based and transactional based services. The recent multimillion dollar with the Pearl Group is to achieve this end. Pearl has 13 platforms which is a most inefficient way of operating. We will rationalize their systems and create a single platform and take a thousand plus of their people and bring them into our fold. The Pearl Group has four million of the closed books in the insurance and pensions space, worldwide, there are 75 million of these available.

The recent Joint Venture (JV) with SBI and the acquisition of FNS will kick start our product space foray. The deal in Chile is a bolt onto the Pearl deal. It gives us a toehold in the life and pension area and credit cards space in South America.

You mentioned that you are adding 1,100 personnel from Pearl Group, where is TCS headed in terms of employee numbers?

The CMC absorption means an addition of 3,300 employees, the integration of Tata Infotech another 3,200, while FNS has seen us add 190 and the Chile operation will add 1,200 people. This means that very quickly we have added close to 8,000 people and this we have done hitting the road running.

We have seen CMC and Tata Infotech adding mass to TCS in different ways through a collaborative model and a merger, what does it mean for the Tata group?

We are going to leverage Tata group companies' strengths to bring comprehensive solutions for our global customers at competitive prices. In addition, we are in the process of amalgamating all the different platforms into one, which will help us in offering best of breed and best in class services at a comparable price.

TCS is aggressively exploring opportunities in the remote network and infrastructure management domain. For this we are going to use the bandwidth of VSNL or Tyco or Teleglobe. Similarly we are going to use the servers of one of the companies. Depending upon the requirements of global customers, the utilities of these services will help us in bringing down the cost. While at the same time increase the efficiencies and dependability as well as quality of services.

In fact, TCS has put in a lot of effort to bring seamless synergies with various vendors and other group companies like Tata Technologies, Tata Elxsi and others. It is a collaborative model where all the companies will benefit. Our go to market strategy incorporates leveraging all our assets all over the world.

What is the differentiator or USP for TCS? Is it price competitiveness?

Let me make it clear that the labor arbitrage model is history. Indian companies are providing end to end solutions. We are not merely a low cost hub, we are much more starting with research and development to service delivery to product delivery. We compete on the global canvas not because of price alone. Though price is an important ingredient, it is not the sole criteria. There are a host of other reasons that goes in favor of India like credibility of delivery on or before time, offering a comprehensive solution that helps these companies in achieving higher productivity.

Since a reasonable number of Indian IT firms has either crossed the billion dollar mark or is poised to do so, they are being viewed as more credible with long-term longevity. That helps us in partnering with some of the global leaders even for critical operations. Each Indian tech company will evolve in its own way - some will be product facing, some engineering, some BPO facing — we have to make sure that depth and breadth of IT is covered by us.

What about merger with other group firms?

No more mergers. The buck stops here. Basically it is the issue of synergies. All the group companies in the technology space have their own space. It is better to have a collaborative model than to go in for a merger.

Given the kind of growth rate you have registered in the recent past, where do you see TCS in the next three to five years in terms of revenues?

It is difficult to give you a number. But our aspiration is to double the turnover every three years through organic growth. While doing so we would also like to ensure our margins should increase or at least remain protected. In fact each of the six bubbles should give us revenues of half a billion dollars in the next three to five years.

Last year, when TCS was listed on the Indian bourses, we were told that TCS would be listed on the US bourses after one year. When is this going to he happening?

We have planned to list overseas, but as of now there is no dialogue. It is difficult to hazard a guess on a timeline. We will be deliberating on this in our board and let you know.

But what is the purpose of an overseas listing?

Let me clarify that an overseas listing would not be for the purpose of raising funds. TCS is a global company. The intent of listing on the overseas market is to create visibility in that local market, which in turn helps in building new businesses. Secondly, it helps the company in hiring and retaining locals as it is easier to give Employee Stock Options (ESOP) to them once you are listed there.

Source: Hindustan Times 29 Nov 2005

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TCS Awake and hungry

Savour a few contradictions. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is slow. TCS is old-fashioned. And TCS will have $3-billion revenues by March 2006 - a full $1 billion more than that of nearest Indian rival, Infosys Technologies.

Over the last seven months, the Tata group's flagship IT company has bagged global outsourcing contracts worth $1,457 million and pushed through acquisitions valued at $50 million. When it closes its accounts for the financial year, these moves will have translated to a $600-million rise in the company's top line, propelling revenues to the $3-billion mark. That's barely three years after it hit $1 billion. Clearly, the company that pioneered the factory model of Indian IT services nearly two decades back is in a hurry to go somewhere. CEO S. Ramadorai quantifies the goal: $10 billion by 2010.

This week, the TCS deal run continued with the acquisition of Chilean BPO firm Comicrom for $26 million. Though a small acquisition, the deal will give the company's BPO business a foothold in the Latin American pensions processing market and add to the critical pensions and insurance BPO skills that TCS has started building. [The $847-million Pearl deal was the first step towards that.] The Comicrom deal comes just two weeks after the $23-million acquisition of Australian banking solutions firm FNS in late October, which TCS bought to augment its products business. Ramadorai intends to maintain the deal momentum. "Over the next two years, growth through acquisitions will become very important for TCS," he says.
TCS's recent moves have certainly perked up the markets. As the stock charts show, the TCS share price has gained significantly over the last nine months. As on October 2005, while its earnings per share (EPS) was trailing Infosys by a fair margin at Rs 59.1 per share (Infosys is at Rs 92.2 per share), in terms of P-E (price-to-earning) ratio, the gap in valuations is quite small. Infosys is trading at a P-E of 29.1, while TCS is at 24.8.

Acquisitions, though critical, is just one component of the 2010 growth strategy being spearheaded by TCS's core think tank - N. Chandrasekaran, executive vice-president (global operations), S. Mahalingam, executive vice- president & CFO and S. Padmanabhan, executive vice-president (HR) at the company's corporate headquarters in Mumbai. The plan to reach $10 billion assumes a complete overhaul of the company's internal processes and businesses, and big jumps in organic growth. Much of the overhaul process has been under way since 2000, and the job is about half done. "In three years, TCS will look like a very different company," says Chandrasekaran, second-in-command to Ramadorai and dubbed internally as CEO-in-waiting.

If TCS does get to $10 billion by 2010 - and that is still a huge stretch target - it will redefine the global pecking order of IT services players (see 'Sizing up the Competition'). It will place TCS at the same high table that is today occupied by IBM Global Services, HP Services, EDS and Accenture. It would make TCS a prime contender in the $1billion-plus order game. It would, in effect, make TCS the first Indian global IT superpower. But for that to happen, it needs to clock growth rates of over 40 per cent year-on-year for the next five years, while the global Top 10 are averaging at 8-10 per cent a year today. The TC Strategy Think Tank.
Can TCS really reach that exalted status? A couple of years ago, the answer would have been no. After two decades in the business, TCS seemed to have lost its growth momentum. Younger rivals like Infosys and Wipro were growing much faster and had almost caught up with TCS in terms of revenues. Worse, both Infosys and Wipro had spotted new growth avenues, while TCS was still stuck with its old legacy businesses.

Making Up For Lost Time

In March 2003, TCS revenues scaled $1 billion. It was a notable milestone no doubt, but the sheen wore off in no time. A year later, Infosys also crossed $1 billion in revenues. The Bangalore-headquartered company had taken much lesser time to scale the heights that had taken TCS over 20 years to climb. Infosys was joined by Wipro and Satyam Computer the same year.

Source: BSE

In early 2004, TCS was beginning to look like a has-been. With 24,168 people on its rolls, close to 20 global development centres, and multiple service capabilities, TCS could still boast of being a more complete company in terms of services and geographical depth than any of its peers. But it had some glaring weaknesses. To begin with, the company's topline growth rates were barely at 20-22 per cent year-on-year, while Infosys and Wipro were clocking steady 35-40 per cent per annum growth rates. TCS's offshore-onsite revenues were also lopsided in favour of onsite 40:60, which meant lower margins. Despite an impressive breadth of service capabilities, it did not have a presence of note in new growth areas like remote infrastructure services, BPO and consulting. Traditional application and maintenance work accounted for over 70 per cent of its revenues. All these factors began to gain prominence as TCS edged closer to its public listing.
Meanwhile, Infosys had chalked out a very clear model for chasing growth. It had a five-year plan to look at the big targets, a three-year model to set strategic targets for each business division, and a one-year goal to address immediate revenue and profit targets. It was looking at $2 billion by 2005-06, and seemed well on its way to achieve that goal. It had kicked off a complete overhaul of its businesses that saw it re-organising along verticals. And it had taken the lead among Indian players in building up the consulting business.

Meanwhile, Wipro was moving equally fast to grab two very different growth opportunities - infrastructure management and BPO. In BPO, Wipro had taken a head start with the acquisition of Spectramind in 2002. It was among the first Indian firms to bag some of the bigger outsourcing contracts, the $80-million Lattice contract.

Though TCS seemed to have fallen asleep, it was actually preparing the base for the spectacular acquisitions and deals that have started rolling this year. In fact, the agenda to propel TCS into the global big league by 2010 was being formulated in April 2000.

Perhaps it was the top management's preoccupation with its impending IPO in 2004 that was slowing the company down. The TCS management is still highly centralised and the strategic decisions are still taken by just four men at the headquarters. Analysts point out that the Tata company will have to address this issue if it wants to become a global company.

At any rate, things speeded up dramatically after the IPO, and the TCS team went on an acquisition and deal- closing spree. One analyst points out that after the IPO, TCS was also under much more public scrutiny than it was as a private company. And that added its own pressure for the team to roll out the ambitious growth plan quickly.

At the core of TCS's Vision 2010 is, what it calls, its 'five-bubble' strategy. It has identified five strategic growth areas - consulting, BPO, infrastructure management, products, and engineering services - which will play a key role in powering its growth to $10 billion. "Each of these businesses will have revenues of $50 million-$200 million by the end of this fiscal. This excludes growth by acquisitions. We see each of these businesses growing to $500 million-$1billion over the next 3-4 years," says Chandrasekaran.

At present, engineering services and infrastructure are its fastest growing areas and will be closer to $200 million in revenues each by the end of this fiscal. In fact, engineering design and services is one of the areas where TCS has a big edge over its domestic rivals. Wipro and Infosys do some work in product and chip design in areas like mobile interfaces, but TCS has the widest breadth of services and a big team of 2,000. It does high-end work in aerospace design and has a large presence in industrial design because of its strong domain focus on the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing accounts for 20 per cent of TCS's revenues and engineering design accounts for 30 per cent of that. An industry veteran points out that these will be critical growth areas for IT service companies in the next few years. Apart from TCS, no Indian firm has any competency in these fields.In infrastructure management though, TCS is still lagging behind Wipro. Globally, infrastructure outsourcing is the space in which most big-ticket deals happen. Companies like IBM and EDS dominate the infrastructure space which also brings in the multi-billion dollar deals. Here, TCS realises it has a huge gap to cover.

Till the beginning of the year, TCS seemed to lack focus in the BPO segment. Wipro and Infosys had taken big strides already. But the recent Pearl outsourcing deal and the Comicrom deal have changed that picture. The Pearl deal was important in terms of the revenues it would add to the BPO business - £60 million (over $100 million) by the end of the year. But it was more than just a big deal for boosting the topline. The real importance of the deal lay in the fact that the Pearl group had built up 13 process platforms to manage its pensions, life and administration services. This was what TCS really wanted - and the reason why it agreed to absorb the 950 Pearl employees. Similarly, Comicrom was attractive to TCS not just because it gave a toehold in the Latin American market but also because it operated in the pensions space - an area TCS hopes to dominate.In consulting though, TCS has not done anything spectacular so far. Unlike Infosys, TCS has not yet carved out the consulting practice as a separate company. That's because Ramadorai says consulting has been embedded into TCS' services all along.

--Sources : Businessworld

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Story of a Software Engineer

An ambitious software engineer finally decided to take a vacation. He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life. At least for a while. A hurricane came up unexpectedly. The ship went down and was lost instantly. The man found himself swept up on the shores of an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing. Only bananas and coconuts.

Used to four-star hotels, this guy had no idea what to do. So, for the next four months he ate bananas, drank coconut juice, longed for his old life, and fixed his gaze on the sea, hoping to spot a rescue ship.

One day, as he was lying on the beach, he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. It was a rowboat, and in it was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. She rowed up to him.

In disbelief, he asked her: "Where did you come from, and how did you get here?"

"I rowed from the other side of the island," she said. "I landed here when my cruise ship sank."

"Amazing," the software engineer said, "I didn't know anyone else had survived. How many of you are there? You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you."

"It's only me," she said, "and the rowboat didn't wash up: nothing did."

He was confused, "Then how did you get the rowboat?"

"Oh, simple," replied the woman. "I made it out of raw material that I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum-tree branches, I wove the bottom from palm branches, and the sides and stern came from a eucalyptus tree."

"But, but, that's impossible," stuttered the man. "You had no tools or hardware - how did you manage?"

"Oh, that was no problem," the woman said. "On the south side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of exposed alluvial rock. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that to make tools, and used the tools to make the hardware. But enough of that. Where do you live?"

Sheepishly, the man confessed that he had been sleeping on the beach the whole time. "Well, let's row over to my place then," she said.

After a few minutes of rowing, she docked the boat at a small wharf. As the man looked onto shore, he nearly fell out of the boat. Before him was a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white.

While the woman tied up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man could only stare ahead, dumbstruck.

As they walked into the house, she said casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Sit down, please. Would you like to have a drink?"

"No, no, thank you," he said, still dazed. "I couldn't drink another drop of coconut juice."

"It's not coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have made a still - How about a Pina Colada?"

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the software engineer accepted, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged their stories, the woman announced, "I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to have a shower and a shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom."

No longer questioning anything, the man went into the bathroom. There in the cabinet was a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow-ground edge were fastened to its tip, inside a swivel mechanism.

"This woman is absolutely amazing," he mused. "What next?"

When he returned, the woman greeted him. She beckoned for him to sit down next to her. "Tell me," she began suggestively, Slithering closer to him, brushing her leg against his, "We've both been out here for a very long time. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing to do for all of these months."

She stared into his eyes.
He couldn't believe what he was hearing - this was like all of his dreams coming true in one day.
"You mean...," he replied, "I can check my e-mail from here?"

IT Consultant

ONCE upon a time there was a shepherd sitting on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie, gets out and asks the Shepherd:

"If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?"

The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies: "Okay." The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Webster, scans he ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then prints out a 150 page report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1,586 sheep here."

The shepherd cheers," That's correct, you can have your sheep."

The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks: "If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?"

The young man answers, "Yes, why not". The shepherd says, "You are an IT consultant ".

"How did you know?" asks the young man.

"Very simple," answers the shepherd. "

First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don't understand anything about my business...

Now can I have my DOG back?"

Silence: The still voice of God

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life when you just ran out of words and you go... s i l e n t ???

Let me assist you in recalling...

.. the moment when you left your home for the first time and you look back at your parents who are worried that their son/daughter are leaving them yet happy that their child took the first step towards independence.


... the moment when the girl/boy you like most.. smiled back at you! You don't say anything.. you just smile back..


... the moment when you get better marks than you expected... those "numb" moments of ecstasy n surprise "is that true?"...


... the moment when you are parting with your old friend(s) and the train has just started... and you are standing on the door of the wagon.. waving "bye-bye" with your heart beating fast...


... the moment after the HR manager has just called you and told you,"You are through! Congrats!"


... the moment when you sit alone in your room after having told everyone that you cleared that exam you prepared for months.

You can go on remembering your "special" moments!

I had always wondered why I never said anything to myself at those moments.. as if it was "understood"... happiness, joy, pain.. all feelings just flowed ceaselessly in the 'years' that passed in those flash moments!


They say.. the best way to communicate is through "silence". Love. Joy. Grief. Surprise. Anger. Hope. Expectations. Support. Non-cooperation...


Can you imagine the importance of a silent moment in a song??


When Bryan Adams stops for a while along with music, before he goes on in his husky voice...
... Please forgive me. I can't stop loving you!

Ever had those moments when you thought you were tired enough that you reach for your bed after dinner.. but find yourself wide awake looking at the roof of your room silently...


But you sure are 'thinking'... those moments of self-talk are the most important in our lives. Those moments when we listen to our own hearts! Those promises... those decisions... those are the moments when we make our destinies!


Next time you go silent... listen carefully to what your heart is saying.. listen to its joy...listen to its pain.. listen to its fears.. listen to its desires..


Don't make it shut up and go off to sleep... LISTEN TO THAT VOICE and ACCEPT EVERYTHING IT SAYS! That voice alone can lead you to the abode of peace that your sleep lacks... peace that awaits you!

Because Silence is The still voice of God.

"Dear DAD"

A FATHER PASSING BY HIS SON'S BEDROOM WAS ASTONISHED TO SEE THE BED WAS NICELY MADE AND EVERYTHING WAS PICKED UP.

THEN HE SAW AN ENVELOPE PROPPED UP PROMINENTLY ON THE CENTER OF THE BED. IT WAS ADDRESSED, "DAD".

WITH THE WORST PREMONITION, HE OPENED THE ENVELOPE AND READ THE LETTER WITH TREMBLING HANDS:

DEAR DAD,

IT IS WITH GREAT REGRET AND SORROW THAT I'M WRITING THIS. I HAD TO ELOPE WITH MY NEW GIRLFRIEND BECAUSE I WANTED TO AVOID A SCENE WITH MOM ! AND YOU.

I'VE BEEN FINDING REAL PASSION WITH BARBARA AND SHE IS SO NICE EVEN WITH ALL HER PIERCING, TATTOOS, AND HER TIGHT MOTORCYCLE CLOTHES.

BUT IT'S NOT ONLY THE PASSION DAD, SHE'S PREGNANT AND BARBARA SAID THAT WE WILL BE VERY HAPPY.

EVEN THOUGH YOU DON'T CARE FOR HER AS SHE IS MUCH OLDER THAN I, SHE ALREADY OWNS A TRAILER IN THE WOODS AND HAS A STACK OF FIREWOOD FOR THE WHOLE WINTER.

SHE WANTS TO HAVE MANY MORE CHILDREN WITH ME AND THAT'S NOW ONE OF MY DREAMS TOO.

BARBARA TAUGHT ME THAT MARIJUANA DOESN'T REALLY HURT ANYONE AND WE'LL BE GROWING IT FOR OURSELVES AND TRADING IT WITH HER FRIENDS FOR ALL THE COCAINE AND ECSTASY WE WANT.

IN THE MEANTIME, WE'LL PRAY THAT SCIENCE WILL FIND A CURE FOR AIDS SO BARBARA CAN GET BETTER; SHE SURE DESERVES IT!!

DON'T WORRY DAD, I'M 15 YEARS OLD NOW AND I KNOW HOW TO TAKE CARE OF MYSELF.

SOMEDAY I'M SURE WE'LL BE BACK TO VISIT SO YOU CAN GET TO KNOW YOUR GRANDCHILDREN.

YOUR SON, JOHN

P.S. DAD, NONE OF THIS IS TRUE. I'M OVER AT THE NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE. I JUST WANTED TO REMIND YOU THAT THERE ARE WORSE THINGS IN LIFE THAN MY REPORT CARD THAT'S IN MY DESK CENTER DRAWER. I LOVE YOU!

CALL WHEN IT'S SAFE FOR ME TO COME HOME.

Feelings ...A Sweet Proposal!

When I saw your name next to mine,
In our wedding card,
I felt blessed.

When I saw you smile,
Seeing me in the traditional bride groom dress,
I felt teased.

When I held your hand,
During the marriage rituals,
I felt responsible.

When you entered my lonely bachelor life,
And changed it into a heavenly abode,
I felt lucky.

When you showed the same love as I did,
Towards my parents,
I felt proud.

When you scolded me,
For neglecting my health amidst my hectic work,
I felt pampered.

When I saw you scream,
Crying out of labor pains,
I felt helpless.

When I saw tears of happiness in your eyes,
As you looked at our kid,
I felt blessed once again.

All these feeling have bloomed in my heart,
But are yet to blossom in reality.
As these are feelings I long to feel,
For these are still unfelt.

Will you marry me?

She finally smiled

From the very beginning, girl's family objected strongly on her dating this guy, saying that it has got to do with family background, & that the girl will have to suffer for the rest of her life if she were to be with him.

Due to family's pressure, the couple quarreled very often. Though the girl loved the guy deeply, she always asked him: "How deep is your love for me?" As the guy is not good with his words, this often caused the girl to be very upset. With that & the family's pressure, the girl often vents her anger on him. As for him, he only endured it in silence.

After a couple of years, the guy finally graduated & decided to further his studies overseas. Before leaving, he proposed to the girl:

"I'm not very good with words. But all I know is that I love you. If you allow me, I will take care of you for the rest of my life. As for your family, I'll try my best to talk them round. Will you marry me?" The girl agreed, & with the guy's determination, the family finally gave in & agreed to let them get married. So before he left, they got engaged. The girl went out to the working society, whereas the guy was overseas, continuing his studies. They sent their love through emails & phone calls. Though it was hard, but both never thought of giving up.

One day, while the girl was on her way to work, she was knocked down by a car that lost control. When she woke up, she saw her parents beside her bed. She realized that she was badly injured. Seeing her mum crying, she wanted to comfort her. But she realized that all that could come out of her mouth was just a sigh. She had lost her voice....

The doctor says that the impact on her brain has caused her to lose her voice. Listening to her parents' comfort, but with nothing coming out from her, she broke down. During the stay in hospital, besides silence cry… It’s still just silence cry that accompanied her. Upon reaching home, everything seems to be the same, except for the ringing tone of the phone which pierced into her heart every time it rang. She does not wish to let the guy know & not wanting to be a burden to him, she wrote a letter to him saying that she does not wish to wait any longer.

With that, she sent the ring back to him. In return, the guy sent millions & millions of reply, countless of phone calls. All this girl could do, besides crying, is still crying.... The parents decided to move away, hoping that she could eventually forget everything & be happy.

With a new environment, the girl learns sign language & started a new life. Telling herself everyday that she must forget the guy. One day, her friend came & told her that he's back. She asked her friend not to let him know what happened to her. Since then, there wasn't anymore news of him.

A year has passed & her friend came with an envelope, containing an invitation card for the guy's wedding. The girl was shattered. When she opened the letter, she saw her name in it instead. When she was about to ask her friend what's going on, she saw the guy standing in front of her.

He used sign language to tell her "I've spent a year to learn sign language. Just to let you know that I've not forgotten our promise. Let me have the chance to be your voice. I Love You." With that, he slipped the ring back into her finger. And then …She finally smiled.

She is beautiful because you love her

The passengers on the bus watched sympathetically as the attractive young woman with the white cane made her way carefully up the steps. She paid the driver and, using her hands to feel the location of the seats, walked down the aisle and found the seat he'd told her was empty. Then she's settled in, placed her briefcase on her lap and rested her cane against her leg.

It had been a year since Susan became blind. Due to a medical misdiagnosis she had been rendered sightless, and she was suddenly thrown into a world of darkness, anger, frustration and self-pity. 'How could this have happened to me?' she would plead, her heart knotted with anger. But no matter how much she cried or ranted or prayed, she knew the painful truth, her sight was never going to return. A cloud of depression hung over Susan's once optimistic spirit. All she had to cling to was her husband Mark.

Mark was an Air Force officer and he loved Susan with all his heart. When she first lost her sight, he watched her sink into despair and was determined to help his wife gain the strength she needed to become independent again.

Finally, Susan felt ready to return to her job, but how would she get there? She used to take the bus, but was now too frightened to get around the city by herself. Mark volunteered to drive her to work each day, even though they worked at opposite ends of the city. At first, this comforted Susan and fulfilled Mark's need to protect his sightless wife who was so insecure about performing the slightest task. Soon, however Mark realized that this arrangement wasn't working - it was hectic, and costly.

Susan is going to have to start taking the bus again, he admitted to himself. But just the thought of mentioning it to her made him cringe. She was still so fragile, so angry. How would she react? Just as Mark predicted, Susan was horrified at the idea of taking the bus again. "I'm blind!" she responded bitterly. "How am I supposed to know where I'm going? I feel like you're abandoning me."

Mark's heart broke but he knew what had to be done. He promised Susan that each day he would ride the bus with her until she got the hang of it.

And that is exactly what happened. For two solid weeks, Mark, military uniform and all, accompanied Susan to and from work each day. He taught her how to rely on her other senses to determine where she was and how to adapt to her new environment. He helped her befriend the bus drivers who could watch out for her, and save her a seat. Each morning they made the journey together, and Mark would take a cab back to his office.

Although this routine was even more costly and exhausting than the previous one, Mark knew it was only a matter of time before Susan would be able to ride the bus on her own. Finally, Susan decided that she was ready to try the trip on her own. Monday morning arrived, and before she left, she threw her arms around Mark, her temporary bus riding companion, her husband, and her best friend. Her eyes filled with tears of gratitude for his loyalty, his patience, his love. She said good-bye, and for the first time, they went their separate ways. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.... Each day on her own went perfectly, and Susan had never felt better.

On Friday morning, Susan took the bus to work as usual. As she was paying for her fare to exit the bus, the driver said, "Boy, I sure envy you." Susan wasn't sure if the driver was speaking to her or not. After all, who on earth would ever envy a blind woman who had struggled just to find the courage to live for the past year? "Why do you envy me?"

The driver responded, "It must feel so good to be taken care of and protected like you are." Susan had no idea what the driver was talking about, "What do you mean?" The driver said, "You know, every morning for the past week, a fine looking gentleman in a military uniform has been standing across the corner watching you when you get off the bus. He makes sure you cross the street safely and he watches you until you enter your office building. Then he blows you a kiss, gives you a little salute and walks away. You are one lucky lady."

Tears of happiness poured down Susan's cheeks. For although she couldn't see him, she had always felt Mark's presence. She was blessed, so blessed, for he had given her a gift more powerful than sight, a gift she didn't need to see to believe - the gift of love that can bring light where there had been darkness.

"You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her..."

Gone are the DAYS but not the MEMORIES

Gone are the days

When

The school reopened in June,

And we settled in our new desks and

benches.

When we queued up in book depot,

And got our new books

and notes.

When we wanted two Sundays and no Mondays, yet

managed

to line up daily for the morning prayers.

We learnt writing with

slates and pencils, and

Progressed To fountain pens and ball pens and

then

Micro tips.

We began drawing with crayons and evolved

to

Colour pencils and finally sketch pens.

We started calculating

first with tables and then with

Clarke's tables and advanced to

calculators and

computers.

When we chased one another in the

corridors in

Intervals, and returned to the classrooms

Drenched in

sweat.

When we had lunch in classrooms, corridors,

Playgrounds,

under the trees and even in cycle sheds.

When all the colors in the

world,

Decorated the campus on the Second Saturdays.

When a single

P.T. period in the week's Time Table,

Was awaited more eagerly than

the monsoons.

When cricket was played with writing pads as

bats,

And Neckties and socks rolled into balls.

When few played

"kabadi" and "Kho-Kho" in scorching sun,

While others simply played

"book cricket" in the

Confines of classroom.

Of fights but no

conspiracies,

Of Competitions but seldom jealousy.

When we used to

watch Live Cricket telecast,

In the opposite house in Intervals and

Lunch breaks.

When few rushed at 3:45 to

"Conquer" window seats in

our School bus.

While few others had "Big Fun", "peppermint",

"

kulfi", " milk ice !" and "sharbat !" at 4o Clock.

Gone are the days

Of Sports Day,

and the annual School Day ,

And the one-month long

preparations for them.

Gone are the days Of the stressful

Quarterly,

Half Yearly and Annual Exams, And the most

enjoyed

holidays after them.

Of tenth and twelfth standards, when

we

Spent almost the whole year writing revision tests.

We learnt,

we enjoyed, we played, we won, we lost,

We laughed, we cried, we

fought, we thought.

With so much fun in them, so many friends,

So

much experience , all this and more.

Gone are the days when we used

to talk for hours with our friends.

Now we don't have time to say a

HI.

Gone are the days when we played games on the road.

Now we

code on the road with laptop.

Gone are the days when we saw stars

shining at night.

Now we see stars when our code doesn't

work.

Gone are the days when we sat to chat with friends on

grounds.

Now we chat in chat rooms.....

Gone are the days where we

studied just to pass.

Now we study to save our job

Gone are the

days where we had no money in our pockets and fun filled

on our

hearts

Now we have the atm as well as credit card but with an empty

heart

Gone are the days where we shouted on the road.

Now we dont

shout even at home

Gone are the days where we got lectures from

all.

Now we give lectures to all... like the one I'm doing

now....

Gone are the days

But not the memories, which will

be

Lingering in our hearts for ever and ever and

Ever and ever and

Ever .....

NO MATTER HOW BUSY YOU ARE ,

DONT FORGET TO

LIVE THE LIFE THAT STILL

EXISTS.

How company's policies or religious traditions get established??

This is based on an actual experiment conducted in U.K. on eight monkeys as it is said...

*Put eight monkeys in a room. In the middle of the room is a ladder, leading to a bunch of bananas hanging from a hook on the ceiling.*

**

*Each time a monkey tries to climb the ladder, all the monkeys are sprayed with ice water, which makes them miserable.*

**

*Soon enough, whenever a monkey attempts to climb the ladder, all of the other monkeys, not wanting to be sprayed, set upon him and beat him up.

Soon, none of the eight monkeys ever attempts to climb the ladder.*

**

*One of the original monkeys is then removed, and a new monkey is put in the room. Seeing the bananas and the ladder, he wonders why none of the other monkeys are doing the obvious. But undaunted, he immediately begins to climb the ladder.*

**

*All the other monkeys fall upon him and beat him silly. He has no idea why. However, he no longer attempts to climb the ladder.*

**

*A second original monkey is removed and replaced. The newcomer again attempts to climb the ladder, but all the other monkeys hammer the crap out of him. This includes the previous new monkey, who, grateful that he's not on the receiving end this time, participates in the beating because all the other monkeys are doing it. However, he has no idea why he's attacking the new monkey.*

**

*One by one, all the original monkeys are replaced. Eight new monkeys are now in the room. None of them have ever been sprayed by ice water. None of them attempt to climb the ladder. All of them will enthusiastically beat up any new monkey who tries, without having any idea why.*

**

*This is how any company's policies or religion's traditions get
Establish.***

Go Kiss the World

This was the welcome address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to the Class of 2006 on July 2, 2004 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India on defining success.Kinda loved it...

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government - he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lessons in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".

That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes.

That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the mimetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

What is Love ???

A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, "What does love mean?" The answers they got wer broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined.
See what you think:

"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toe-nails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love." Rebecca -age 8

"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs." Chrissy - age 6

"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired." Terri - age 4

"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK." Danny - age 7

"Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday." Noelle - age 7

"Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well." Tommy - age 6

"During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling. He was the only one doing that. I wasn't scared anymore." Cindy - age 8

"Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford." Chris - age 7

And the final one -- Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he was asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child. The winner was a four-year-old child whose next-door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his Mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, "Nothing, I just helped him cry."

Read funny quotes at http://indiquote.blogspot.com/

A nice desert story

A story tells that two friends
were walking
through the desert

During some point of the
journey they had an
argument, and one friend
slapped the other one
in the face.
The one who got slapped
was hurt, but without
saying anything,
wrote in the sand:
TODAY MY BEST FRIEND
SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE.
They kept on walking
until they found an oasis,
where they decided
to take a bath.
The one who had been
slapped got stuck in the
mire and started drowning,
but the friend saved him.
After he recovered from
the near drowning,
he wrote on a stone:
TODAY MY BEST FRIEND
SAVED MY LIFE.
The friend who had slapped
and saved his best friend
asked him, "After I hurt you,
you wrote in the sand and now,
you write on a stone, why?"
The other friend replied
"When someone hurts us
we should write it down
in sand where winds of
forgiveness can erase it away.
But, when someone does
something good for us,
we must engrave it in stone
where no wind
can ever erase it."
LEARN TO WRITE
YOUR HURTS IN
THE SAND AND TO
CARVE YOUR
BENEFITS IN STONE.
They say it takes a
minute to find a special
person, an hour to
appreciate them, a day
to love them, but then
an entire life
to forget them.
Do not value the THINGS
you have in your life. But value
WHO you have in your life!

Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend ?

The author Tristan Miller, is working at German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Erwin-Schr¨odinger-Straße 57, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany. Thanks to ranjith for a nice paper ...

Abstract

Informal empirical and anecdotal evidence from the (male) scientific community has long pointed to the difficulty in securing decent, long-term female companionship. To date, however, no one has published a rigorous study of the matter. In this essay, the author investigates himself as a case study and presents a proof, using simple statistical calculus, of why it is impossible to find a girlfriend.

Why don’t I have a girlfriend?

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: “Is it because I’m too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?” When all other plausible explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honored conclusion that “there must be Something Wrong with me” before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity. Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I’ll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus. Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age—let’s say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term allencompassing to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent—she doesn’t have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are—three simple demands, which I’m sure everyone will agree, are anything but unreasonable. That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible—in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavor to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review. Let’s now take a look at the figures.

Number of people on Earth (in 1998): 5 592 830 000

[WP98, Table A–3]

We start with the largest demographic in which I am interested—namely, the population of this planet. That is not to say I’m against the idea of interstellar romance, of course; I just don’t assess the prospect of finding myself a nice Altairian girl as statistically significant. Now anyway, the latest halfway-reliable figures we have for Earth’s population come from the United States Census Bureau’s 1999 World Population Profile [WP98]. Due presumably to the time involved in compiling and processing census statistics, said report’s data is valid only as of 1998, so later on we’ll be making some impromptu adjustments to bring the numbers up to date.

. . . Who are female: 2 941 118 000

[WP98, Table A–7]

I’d’ve thought that, given the title of this essay, this criterion goes without saying. In case anyone missed it, though, I am looking for exclusively female companionship. Accordingly, roughly half of the Earth’s population must be discounted. Sorry, guys.

. . . In “developed” countries: 605 601 000

[WP98, Table A–7]

We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called “first-world countries”. My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in North America, Europe, and Australia, so it is to these types of regions that the numbers have been narrowed.

. . . Currently (in 2000) aged 18 to 25: 65 399 083

[WP98, Tables a–3, A–7]

Being neither a pedophile nor a geriatrophile, I would like to restrict my search for love to those whose age is approximately equal to my own. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the “population by age” tables in [WP98] are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into “15–19” (of whom there are 39 560 000) and “20–44” (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; in this group, I’m interested in dating those 18 or older, so, assuming the “15–19” girls’ ages are uniformly distributed, we have 39 560 000 × (21 − 18 + 1)/ (19 − 15 + 1) = 31 648 000. Similarly, of 1998’s “20–44” category, there are now 215 073 000 × (25 − 22 + 1)/( 44 − 20 + 1) = 34 411 680. Females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 18 to 25 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these 2 girls will have died since the census was taken; thus, the true number of so-far eligible bachelorettes is 65 399 083.

. . . Who are beautiful: 1 487 838

Personal attraction, both physically and personality-wise, is an important instigator of any relationship. Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population. Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm. From basic statistics theory, the area to the left of the normal curve at z = 2 is

0.5 – 1/ sqrt (root (2*pi)) * Integration (lm 0 to 2) of pow (e, -0.5) square (z) dz = 0.022 75

And so it is this number with which we multiply our current population pool.

. . . And intelligent: 236 053

Again, intelligence can mean different things to different people, yet I am once more relieved of making any explanation by noting that it, like most other characteristics, has a notionally normal distribution across the population.

Let’s assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; in that case, a further

0.5+ 1/ sqrt (root (2*pi)) * Integration (lm 0 to 1) of pow (e, 0.5) square (z) dz = 84.135 %

Of the population must be discounted.

. . . And not already committed: 118 027

I could find no hard statistics on the number of above-noted girls who are already married, engaged, or otherwise committed to a significant other, but informal observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that the proportion is somewhere around 50%. (Fellow unattached males will no doubt have also noticed a preponderance of girls legitimately offering, “Sorry, I already have a boyfriend” as an excuse not to go on a date.) For reasons of morality (and perhaps too self-preservation), I’m not about to start hitting on girls who have husbands and boyfriends. Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits.

. . . And also might like me: 18 726

Naturally, finding a suitable girl who I really like is no guarantee that she’ll like me back. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let’s make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. In that case, referring to our previous calculation, only 15.8655% of females would consider someone with my physical characteristics and personality acceptable as a potential romantic partner.

Conclusion

It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. That’s very nearly 67 years. As a North American male born in the late 1970s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 70 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams. Come to think of it, she’ll probably be dead too.

Reference

[WP98] U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report WP/98, World Population Profile: 1998.
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999