Remembering Bhagat Singh

Born 110 years ago in a small village in Lyallpur district (now Faislabad in Pakistan) of undivided pre-independence India’s Punjab Province, Bhagat Singh went on to etch his name in the history books for his invaluable contribution to the Indian Freedom struggle. On this 110^th birth anniversary, let’s revisit few facts of the iconic freedom fighter, who was executed on March 23, 1931, when he was just 23 years old.

Bhagat Singh left home for Kanpur when his parents tried to get him married, saying that if he married in Slave India, “my bride shall only be death” and joined Hindustan Socialist Republic Association. Bhagat Singh along with Sukhdev planned to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai and plotted to kill the Superintendent of Police James Scott in Lahore. However in case of mistaken identity, John Saunders, the Assistant Superintendent of Police was shot.

Although a Sikh by birth, he shaved his beard and cut his hair to avoid being recognized and arrested for the killing. He managed to escape from Lahore to Calcutta. On April 8, 1929, Bhagat Singh, along with freedom fighter Batukeshwar Dutt, hurled two bombs inside the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi to protest against an unfavorable bill. Interestingly, their actual intentions behind this defiant act were to get arrested and to use the subsequent court appearances to further the cause of their organization Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) for India’s Independence.

Along with the bombs, Singh also threw in copies of a leaflet in the assembly that quoted a French anarchist as saying, “It takes a loud noise to make the deaf hear”, and signs off with the now epochal statement, ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ or ‘Long Live the revolution’. He did not resist his arrest at this point. At the time of his trial, he didn’t offer any defence, rather used the occasion to propagate the idea of India’s Freedom.

In his famous article titled “Why I am an atheist?” written in jail in early October 1930, he wrote he found fulfillment through serving humanity and liberating it from sufferings and distress. Apart from Freedom from the British, his goal was to build an India where poverty, socio-economic disparity and exploitation did not exist.

Koovagam: Transgender Festival of India

Transgenders, otherwise called 'Hijaras' in India, have been always been a part of the society. But till today, they have failed to gain acceptance into mainstream society and live on the fringes of it. Reduced to begging and forced prostitution to somehow make a living, the transgender community has always been scorned and looked down upon. While that is the general perception around the country, there is a village in south India which cherishes and celebrates the transgender identity.

Every year, between April and May, thousands of transgenders from across the country celebrates the transgenders festival in Koovagam, a remote village in Tamil Nadu. This festival is celebrated in the Koothandavar Temple of Koovagam and has its roots in Hindu Epic Mahabharata.

According to legend, during the Mahabharata war, on the 18^th day there came a scenario where the Pandavas had to sacrifice someone from themselves to Goddess Kali to win the battle. Aravan (the son of Arjuna and Ulupi, the Naga Princess) offered himself to be sacrificed for his clan to win. But he asked Lord Krishna for one last wish to be fulfilled, to be married before his death. With just one day’s marriage and a lifetime of widowhood ahead, no woman was willing to marry Aravan. So Lord Krishna took his ‘Mohini’ Avatar and became Aravan’s bride. As promised, Aravan offered himself as sacrifice the next day.

In this festival, thousands of transgenders who came for the annual event consider themselves the brides of Aravan. They celebrate this festival with songs, dances, games and even a beauty pageant. The winner of the pageant is crowned ‘Miss Koovagam’. On the 17^th day, these transgenders dress up like brides and tie mangalsutra around their necks, acts like Mohini and on the last day i.e. 18^th day, acts as widows and mourn the death of Aravan by breaking their bangles and mangalsutra, symbolizing the end of their one-day marriage. 

History of Sardar Sarovar Dam

The Sardar Sarovar project was a vision of the first deputy prime minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. It is one of the largest dams in the world, having a length of 1.2 kms and a depth of 163 metres, the dam is expected to be shared among the three states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Four crore Gujaratis will get drinking water and 22,000 hectares of land will be irrigated.

The foundation stone of the project was laid out by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on April 5, 1961 after carrying out a study on the usage of the Narmada River water that flowed through the states of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat and into the Arabian Sea. A project report prepared for the dam led to much dispute over the means of distributing the Narmada water among the three states – Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. As the negotiations bore no fruit, a Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal (NWDT) was created in 1969 to decide the fate of the project.

After having studied a large number of reports and studies made by the three states, the NWDT gave its verdict in 1979. Accordingly, the 35 Billion cubic metres of water available for consumption from the dam, Madhya Pradesh would receive 65 percent, Gujarat 32 percent and Rajasthan & Maharashtra would be eligible for the remaining 3 percent. The Planning commission finally approved the project in 1988.

As the planning of the project was on its way, though, it soon caught the attention of social activists who found that the dam did not meet the required environmental and social conditions as meted out by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Foremost among those who raised voice against the project was Medha Patkar who first visited the site of the dam in 1985. The consistent struggle to dismantle the project built a huge amount of pressure on the World Bank and a bank commissioned panel was set up to review the project. On concluding the fact that inadequate assessment had been made by the Indian government and the World Bank prior to sanctioning the project, the government on March 31, 1993 cancelled the loan authorized by the World Bank.

After several years of much deliberation, however, the Supreme Court allowed the construction of the dam to proceed, provided it met with certain conditions. The foremost condition placed by the Court was that all those displaced by the increase in height of 5 metres be satisfactorily rehabilitated and that the process be repeated for every five metres increase in height. The project has the potential to feed as many as 20 million people, provide domestic and industrial water for about 30 million, employ about 1 million, and provide valuable peak electric power in an area with high unmet power demand. Currently the height of the dam has been raised to 138.68 metres with a usable storage of 4.73 Million acre feet of water.

How Startups can use Programmatic Television Advertising

Marketing and Promotion is all about taking your product or service to the right target audience at the pre-decided time, and in an efficient way. How cool it would be if this bang-on strategy could work as well for startup companies like it does for the established ones. The big positive differentiator for the large and well-known brands is that they are already empowered with huge resources and can strike gold relatively faster and far more easily than their smaller counterparts.

On the other hand, it’s really a roughhouse for the startups as they scramble to arrive at the right strategy and media plan because they are restricted by limited resources in terms of effort, finance and time. Things are changing now, by new technology called Programmatic TV (PTV), which is the automation of TV advertisement buying/selling process, based on audience preferences. Now we have a data driven media buying process already accepted in the digital media – that brings buyers and sellers on to an automated marketplace, making the experience simpler and more efficient. PTV ads are placed intelligently based on audience data to help you reach your target audiences.

This technology based platform empowers the media planners and buyers by automating the optimization and execution process for traditional TV Advertising. The traditional TV buying process, like all long-established ones, is well institutionalized in the industry, but over time, has gotten into a lapse and so and now has its challenges. In addition, it offers only an approximate plan to reach the desired target audience, which means the ad may or may find the bull's eye before considerable money has already been spent. This is particularly painful for startups as they struggle to find their feet in a crowded and competitive market and have to smarten up.

Currently, media buying professionals are using their precious time and energy in manual work and processes such as request for proposals, order for ad insertions and waiting for confirmations. This is usually done through scores of emails, faxes and spreadsheets. With the entry of PTV, media buyers will have access to the convenience of a scientific approach that helps do away with the time-consuming, laborious and often less-efficient ways of the manual TV advertising buying model.

So, when they opt for programmatic buying, it helps create a customized dashboard for each product/service that their marketers want to promote and enables them to track the campaign’s performance for the desired target audience and other performance metrics that are relevant to the marketer. It’s all about getting the right inventory in a way that ensures optimization of the ROI from the advertisement.

Traditional TV advertising involves shifting through huge and complex number of choices of channels and programs. PTV comes with the technology to filter the massive data mining and analytics and aids strategic decision making. With an automated buying and scheduling, marketers/advertisers can effectively target their existing and potential customers while also saving a lot of time and effort. PTV creates a marketplace where media buyers and sellers interact in an open and transparent manner.

Getting the right inventory through PTV is not just a boon for startups or small companies, but also for established brands. Given the large quantum of ads that big players are releasing to promote their products/services, it’s important to assess which ads are effective in influencing the target customers rather than running those which do not help in moving the needle. Today, most small companies, including startups, start reaching out their target customers through the digital advertising medium across social media, websites and online ads.

Smart phones have made this easy, enabling easy reach to new customers and this explains the rise in interest for digital advertising, especially among small businesses. As Business grows, companies feel the need to shift to the television medium. This is where PTV attempts to make a difference. It brings the sophistication and convenience of digital advertising to the popularity and reach of the TV medium.

PTV promises to change the dynamics of TV advertising as it works on making the processes simpler and cost-effective. The platform gives advertisers a range of options in audience buying, thereby maximizing the value of TV ad spots. With such time-consuming, chaotic processes out of their way, marketers can focus more and better on reaching the target customers. If a startup can learn the ropes of effective advertising on television through programmatic TV, they will be better positioned to speed up their scale up process even after they make it big.

Book Review: India Unbound

India Unbound is mainly about the transformation of India from (1942) to (1999). The book details about the Indian politics and the economy of India. India Unbound is the riveting story of a nation’s rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Gurucharan Das examines the highs and lows of independent India through the prism of history, his own experiences and those of numerous others he has met – from young people in sleepy UP villages to chiefs of software companies in Bangalore. Defining and exploring the new mindset of the nation, India Unbound is the perfect introduction to contemporary India.

This book is not just about India - it is really about the economy, political ideologies, business, globalism, entrepreneurship, governments, the future, and much more. I found myself wanting to highlight the entire book! That’s because these complicated topics are explained with such simplicity (using India as the main case-study) that it all made sense. The book includes author personal stories, history of Indian politics and world lessons from other countries, and many of the rollercoaster downs and ups associated with good storytelling. Despite the mistakes and bleak past, the book is ended with the most excitement, passion, and energy for the future.

The book is categorized in three major parts: Our Spring of Hope (1942-65), The Lost Generation (1966-91) and The Rebirth of Dream (1991-99) or we can say it is divided into Pre-Independence Era, Post-Independence Era and Post-Liberalized India.

In Pre-Independence, British Raj did harm India, the reason that Indian handicrafts lost to machine driven goods is also significant. Hand looms all over the world were impacted by emergence of technology and since India was largest textile maker in the world, it got impacted the most. Emergence of “Brown Sahib” in British Raj: Primarily Brahmins learnt English and took up the clerical and managerial job for Britishers. Indians prefer vertical over horizontal relations, on numerous instances from wars to running industries.

In Post-Independence, most western nations were going through a phase of emphasizing wealth distribution. Unfortunately, many of the Indian bureaucrats trained in these nations forgot that India needed wealth creation first. Among common man, trade was not seen as positive outcome game, but it was perceived as zero sum game. While socialism was popular during Nehru’s era, it has lost most of its charm in a couple of decades, but during Indira’s rule, controls were further tightened. Several state-owned enterprises emerged during this era which was not profitable and it was illegal to close them. By 1980, 75% of state-owned companies were in losses and 14 banks were nationalized and in a decade, most of them were bankrupt.

In Post-Liberalized India, being short of foreign exchange reserves, India asks for a loan from IMF and starts economic reforms in parallel. Author praises Narsimha Rao (PM), Manmohan Singh (FM) and P Chidambram (Commerce Minister) for their role in liberalizing Indian economy. Several examples like Zee TVs Subhash Chandra, NIIT’s Rajendra Pawar has been given to illustrate first generation millionaires created by liberalization.

There are three ways to compete – superior [lower] prices, superior product and superior service, as of now, Indian industries follow superior prices and they should move to superior service now, the growth of middle class is one of the most significant consequence of liberalization. A major area where reform has still not occurred is education and nation is in a dire need of it. India missed Industrial revolution, IT revolution is therefore, critical for India. While some people fear that Indians is westernizing, author believes India is “modernizing” and the “spiritual component of life” is here to stay in Indian life.

International Literacy Day

The first International Literacy Day was celebrated in 1967 and this tradition has been held annually for 50 years. The idea of celebrating International Literacy Day was first discussed during the World Conference of Ministers of Education in Tehran, Iran on September 8 to 19 with the objective to end illiteracy.

While the UNESCO has noted positive trends of growing literacy rates among children, the drop in the illiteracy rate has not matched the increase in population. Between 2001 and 2011, the population above the age of 7 grew by 18.65 crore but the decrease in the number of illiterates is just 3.11 crore.

2015 UNESCO report said that in terms of absolute numbers, India – with 28.7 crore illiterates – was the country with the largest number of adults without basic literacy skills in 2010-11 compared to 2000-01 when it had 30.4 crore illiterates.

According to UNESCO, “literacy is now understood as a means of identification understanding, interpretation, creation and communication in an increasingly digital, text meditated, information rich and fast changing world”. According to UN’s International Telecommunications Union suggest that, in 2016, 53% of the world’s population does not have access to Internet. Nearly two billion people did not use Mobile phones and almost a half billion lived outside areas with mobile connectivity.

Despite the significant literacy progress made in the past decades, the world was still home to 758 Million illiterate adults and 263 Million out of school children of primary and secondary school age in 2014.

What is Beacon Technology?

Beacons have been generating buzz since 2013, when Apple first introduced iBeacon Technology. And while it may have appeared for a time that this new way of connecting with customers might be slow to catch on, today it’s catching fire. According to a report, Beacons would be driving $44 Billion in retail sales by 2016. While there’s been a lot of hype around Beacons, they haven’t necessarily been very well understood.

Retail is probably the most often cited example of an industry employing Beacons, with heavy hitters like Lord and Taylor deploying them in their stores. Starwood Hotels is running a pilot program to replace hotel room keys with Beacons. Major league Baseball is using them to reach out to fans in stadiums to offer them seat upgrades. American Airlines is one of a growing number of airlines leveraging Beacon technology to improve connections with customers in airports.

Apple explains iBeacon Technology to consumers as the enabling technology for Apple devices to alert apps or websites when someone approaches or leaves a location. In other words, retail or other venues that have Beacons in place can detect where a customer is at any given moment. This is the key part as the retailer or other business can push timely messages to that customer promoting products or providing other useful information.

Say someone is walking past a retail store, if they’ve downloaded the retailer’s mobile app, the company can use Beacon messages to capture their attention as they go by, enticing them to enter. Once inside, Beacons can be used to make personalized offers, speed checkout processes and pretty much anything else the retailer can dream up.

Apple doesn’t actually make Beacons, it has developed iBeacon standard around which Beacons can be built. Google has its own Beacon standard, Eddystone. There are a number of players in the Beacon manufacturing space – not only Kontakt, but also BlueSense, Gelo, Estimote and others.

Beacons employs Bluetooth low energy (BLE) wireless technology to pinpoint the location of customers in stores and other places and to deliver messages to their mobile devices. Specifically, a Beacon emits a BLE signal that a retailer’s or other company’s app on a smartphone coming within range of that signal can pick up on. A big differentiator between Beacons and RFID is that Beacons are far more private because it gives users control of the apps that leverage the Beacon. Beacons are authenticated and with user permission, which can ultimately lead to tremendous experience as a result.

Beacon will overcome the major hurdle for companies that want to engage with customers in a more personalized way.