Month: July 2016

The road from Silk Board (near koramanagala) to Electronic city is a 14 lane road. Probably the biggest capacity in India. It consists of a 6 lane main road, a 4 lane elevated toll-road and 2+2 lane service road. Yet today it took me more than 2 hours to cross the 10km long stretch.
Almost all the traffic problems can be attributed to stupidity of the municipal authorities. The crossings are not well defined. There street signs, or even the street names are missing. The traffic lights don’t work and the road signs have no directions on what route to take to reach the destination.
How difficult is it to plan for a straight road? Do you need a college degree to realize that if drains are not laid out then there will be water logging and traffic congestion? If the speedbreakers are not painted, the whole city has to drive slow for the entire stretch? If there is standing water on the road, the underlying mud will wash away and leave behind a pothole.
There is no cure to stupidity, and Bangalore municipality is a living example. The new parts of the city are most poorly design and are killing the city slowly. The tax collection is good but all the money is squandered away through corruption & stupidity. If you want to learn city mismanagement then visit Bangalore. It has the highest road tax in the country. (Maruti Ciaz is 1.2L cheaper in Delhi than in Karnataka) The fuel prices are highest in the country, the bus fare is 330 bucks from airport to Electronic city again highest in the country and the quality of life poorest in the country.
Siddaramaiah… Where the fuck are my taxes going????

I expect upgrade to be newer, faster, better versions of the existing models. Traditionally they had additional functionality, increased utility, yielded higher productivity and had better aesthetics.
On the contrary, the upgrades often are bulkier, consume more battery and often have bugs with erratic behavior. The only change will be that many of the Freeium apps will have newer set ever annoying ads. Are the upgrades a ruse to make you feel that your phone’s battery, processor & storage are insufficient? Why is a deliberate deterioration of user experience & sufficiency of hardware called upgrade?
Every week there would be 20-50 different apps that would require an upgrade. Every month there will be an operating system upgrade. If you ignore the upgrade, then like the distant windows desktop cousin, you will get annoying pop-up reminders every time you unlock the phone and the apps will suddenly stop functioning due to compatibility issues. If you accept the alleged upgrades, then 1GB of data will disappear every week at a huge cost to your wallet if you are on the GSM data plan.
My problem is not the frequency or the data cost, but the very concept of the updates. Often there are no apparent incremental gains that I would expect. What’s worse the infamous Feb 2016 iphone upgrade introduced ‘Error 53’ which killed the cherished device of many. So many people
A friend told me that updates are a method to collect personal data & usage heuristics from your phone. It also plays around loopholes in the ranking mechanism of app stores by bloating the number of downloads & active users. If these are the only two reasons, then I should do a factory reset of my phone and disable google store forever.

If you were to choose between owning a 2 bedroom house/flat in a decent locality (fully paid, no EMI/loans) and a 2 year MBA which one would you choose?
If you are wondering why I am asking this, then consider the tuition fees, add to it the boarding, lodging costs and the opportunity cost for lost wages, you could easily afford a house with the same money.
I do not doubt that education is important in one’s life and one should not put a price to it. However the life does not stop the day you enroll into a B-school. The loans esp. student loan for your under-graduation, home loan needs to be taken care of. The family obligations do not stop just because you have taken a sabbatical or vacation. What’s worse is that earning money makes us addicted to a certain standard of living and it is difficult to scale back. As a result it is harder for anybody who has worked for a few years to resume studies.
Your friends and colleagues who continued to work would have earned many accolades & laurels over the two years. Most of them would be promoted as well and would be well regarded in their streams. While invariably MBA graduates have to start afresh. Many of them are considered too old/expensive for fresher jobs and too inexperienced for the higher level jobs.
You get invited to the funding/sell-off parties of your colleagues while staring at your empty bank balances. Actually MBA makes it harder for people to pursue their dream as an entrepreneur. You have lost some precious years and capital due to the two year program and that’s put you in a catch-up mode. No wonder IIMs boast of many things, but IITs still have an edge over the number of entrepreneurs they have churned out.
I am not ranting, but cautioning the CAT/MBA aspirants that the world does not owe you a living. Take cold calculated decisions about the viability of your dream. MBA might make you book-smart, but are you ready to compete with a street smart in a knife-fight at the end of your program?