Ripples on the brain

Coming to think of it, it’s still hard to believe it is a coincidence!

The probability of a hero of a movie having your name is reasonably high (especially, as a friend tells me, if your name is so common that in a group of 5 random South Indian men, there’s 100% probability that atleast one of them will have your name; yeah I know this is an exaggeration, but you get the point!)

The probability of a heroine in a movie having your wife’s name is medium, considering she does not have a very South Indian sort of a name.

Now what is the probability that in a movie, both the hero and the heroine have your name and your wife’s name respectively? Pretty low I would think.

Let’s go a step further. What is the probability that a movie *actually* has (and just has) your name and your wife’s name and the lead characters have your name and your wife’s name? It’s very hard to believe it is possible!

Such a movie got released on April 10th here! However, the twist in the tale is that the movie didn’t cross the second day in many theatres. We planned to watch the movie in theatre, but couldn’t find one that was still showing the movie even as early as April 15th .

Reference: The same people? Surely not

Please answer the following questions:

1. Tamil actor ilayathalapathi Vijay’s actual name is Joseph Vijay. Why did he leave out Joseph and just have Vijay?

2. Another actor Vikram’s actual name is John Kennedy. His close friends call him Kenny. He chose to call himself Vikram, which unlike in the previous example, is not even a part of his original name. Why so?

3. There’s another actor in Tamil Nadu whose popular name is Shaam (sounds more like Shyam), but his actual name is Shamshuddin. Did he break his name only because it would be easier to call him?

4. Why did Tabu not choose to keep her actual name Tabassum Hashmi?

I don’t think you can make conclusions so soon with few data points.

Does being a successful entrepreneur and an alumni of BITS / IIMA qualify one to represent people? Agreed that the guy, if elected, will probably fall in the 99th percentile of MP’s in terms of education. Agreed that he shows a semblance of vision for his constituency if you go through his website and manifesto, which I have never seen from anyother candidate in my constituency. Agreed that everybody likes his rags-to-riches story. Agreed that he’s probably 100 times more hardworking and successful that me. But that still doesn’t convince me that he can be my representative.

Right from the time this guy shot to prominence, a lot of my friends who have been his classmates at one institution or the other have told me that his actual story is not what he makes it out to be in the press. His other utterances in his interviews about him being discriminated in educational institutions doesn’t seem to be true. So, I really have my doubts.

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What is this thing about Young India or some such campaign that Times of India runs about the oldest Parliament (in terms of the average age of MP’s) representing the youngest country? I’m not a fan of the idea of having young MP’s just for the heck of it. Unless a guy is well-qualified, has done some extra-ordinary social work in his short lifetime, I don’t think I’ll vote for a guy just because he’s young. If we were to go by the thinking of this campaign, we will bring in a lot of Varun Gandhi’s to the Parliament. TOI seems to simply cash in on what it thinks is its target segment.

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The best case scenario, at this point, would be for Congress to get near simple majority and Pranab Mukherjee to be the Prime Minister. And if I’m allowed a little more liberty, I’ll say this should happen without its ally, the DMK, getting a single seat in Tamil Nadu. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I know none of the things above will happen. The worst thing for the country as a whole would be the Third Front drama playing out for another one year before another election gets imposed. If people like Deve Gowda get one more shot at the limelight, it will show all the voters of the country in poor light.

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A lot is being said about the IPL being shifted out of the country. Mr. Swaminathan Aiyer makes his own conclusions in TOI, which seem to be a stretch. IPL is not an event of national importance for the common man. To me, it is akin to the high and the wealthy betting on horses of their choice, just to flaunt their wealth. While I can’t hate Chidambaram enough, I think he called it absolutely right in this issue. He didn’t give IPL an iota of more prominence than it deserved (while taking care not to dismiss it entirely) and made sure it came nowhere near something as important as a General Election. I think it is one of the very few times where the Indian Government has been very proactive and has given the message loud and clear that the safety of the general public is more important than the safety of some 8 teams. If we don’t have the bandwidth to provide security for two different things, then we need to admit it and do what is possible. The massiveness of Indian electoral exercise should not be under-estimated. All the talk around losing tourism revenues because of the exodus of IPL is all humbug. I don’t even care.

Sufficient alarms have been raised in the Indian newspapers about Obama’s speech to the US Congress, specifically on sections of the speech that deal with outsourcing. While I agree that Obama’s made-for-the-gallery (just like Tamil kuthu songs made for front benchers) speeches take a long time to comprehend, it is irritating to see that almost all the newspapers have religiously confined themselves to the same text that was probably passed over to them by some news agency. The text that can found here (courtesy: Rediff), quotes the specific portion of Obama’s speech, arbitrarily gives the number of firms that will be affected, talks about what “certain” Democrats think, gives an arbitrary number of jobs that were “shipped” overseas, gives sketchy details of the “tax code”, safely names a few large US corporations that will be affected (now, these companies can generally be named for any set of criteria), gives some arbitrary dollar and tax percentage figures without indicating how much the companies that outsource will actually lose and then gives some unhelpful historical details. The only difference in the report in the Indian newspapers seems to be in the editing: some of them have trimmed the last portion of the news, and some have added a text in between the paragraphs on Indian IT companies getting severely affected. I have been trying to get sense of this news for the last one hour without great success.

Please find below my interpretation of the whole news. This may or may not be correct.
What is the relevant US tax code?

What the US tax code has is a decades-old provision that allows American companies to defer income tax payments on offshore profits until they are repatriated back home

Another version from the text in Rediff:

“…proposed move to do away with a particular provision of the country’s tax code that allows them to pay lower taxes for profits repatriated from foreign shores….Back in 2004, the US Congress had allowed a one-year repatriation tax holiday which reduced the 35 per cent tax rate on foreign earnings of American companies to just 5.25 per cent.”

Based on the text above, who does it apply to?

Companies that outsource IT jobs to India (to other Indian outsourcing firms; i.e. say if Pepsico outsources part of its IT maintenance to Infosys), do not make profits offshore. IT is mostly a cost center, which by definition, does not make profits. Companies definitely increase their profits by outsourcing or offshoring, but this is because of lowered costs of offshore resources and not because of “profits from offshore”. Even companies that have India-based IT captives do not make profits in India, unless of course the Indian captives work for outside clients as well.

So, who makes “offshore profits”?

Only companies that have wholly owned subsidiaries in other countries, like India, that cater to the local market make offshore profits. For example, Pepsico sells bottled drinks in India and makes profits from its operations. If Pepsico India is owned by Pepsico US, which is most likely the case, then this law applies to Pepsico US.

What is the tax code?

Now, companies that make profits in other countries, in the absence of any favorable tax laws, will essentially be taxed twice on the profits they make in the other countries: first, by the country in which they earned the profits and second, by their home country. It appears to me that this was the case in the US due to a “Tax Reform Act of 1986” (courtesy: http://www.accf.org/publications.php?pubID=14; only some sections are relevant and I think the news report gets its 35% arbitrary number from here).

Now, this tax code seems to have been applied, taken-off, re-applied in other forms and taken off again several times, so it is hard to identify what was the original state. When the tax code applies, it means that companies no longer have to pay taxes for the profits they earn in another country as soon as they earn them. One version of the tax concession is that the taxes will be deferred until the profits earned in another country are repatriated to the home country. That version seems to have been repealed in 1986. The 2004 version seems to be that (from the news item in rediff above), companies get a one year flat tax holiday on the profits earned abroad. Since, both the news items above are contradictory, it’s hard to verify what the actual concession is. Whatever the concession is, from the companies’ point of view, it seems to be correct, since profits earned in another country could be re-invested in that country itself, for growing the company, which means profits didn’t make it to the parent company at all and the company will be unfairly taxed. This tax code, thus, appears to reduce the tax burden on multinational US companies, thus, making them more competitive with their competitors from other countries. The reasoning is that if a French company, for example, caters to US customers and competes with an American company, that is again multinational, double taxation would make the American company less competitive vis-à-vis the French company even in the US markets. Since, French company enjoys the tax concession from its Government (my assumption; may or may not be true), the US company should also enjoy the same just to be on equal footing.

So far so good. So, what are the arguments against the tax code? A lot of companies, as expected, abuse the tax code (i.e. the concessions provided to them by deferring tax on the profits they make outside their country) through tax haven operations and transfer pricing frauds (again, courtesy: http://www.accf.org/publications.php?pubID=14). It is easy to see how this happens. In their books, the companies would inflate, for example, the sales costs in foreign countries, so that while they show the profits in their income statements for their shareholders, they pay taxes only for the US portion of their profits, and claim whatever concession is available for the offshore portion of the profits. So, the argument against the tax code is that it is prone to a lot of abuses by rich corporations and hence, tantamounts to cheating the common man by taxing the cheating big corporations less.

Why is the concession being repealed now?

The easy reasoning is what Bobby Jindal calls “growing the government”. For all the stimulus packages that Obama is doling out every day, he needs as much money from taxes as he can get. Repealing the tax concession above is just one of the many ways to raise taxes. As I said earlier, this doesn’t seem to be the first time the tax concession is being repealed. This is just being related to outsourcing this time.

Is it anyway connected with job creation in America?

All the dollars raised by the government through taxation can be directly or indirectly linked to job creation. At least, that is what Obama is trying to portray with all the stimulus packages. Other way in which jobs could be created is, companies that were encouraged by the tax code to keep the offshore profits earned at offshore will now remit those profits back to the US sooner, which it could be claimed, will lead to more job creation. It could also be argued (admittedly, by some stretch of imagination) that some roles that apply for all subsidiaries and the parent company would have actually been offshored to show lower profits repatriated from offshore, even though these roles could be performed the best in the US (I’m not able to think of a very good example. This cannot be true in case the roles are direct costs to the company, as then they reduce the profits anyway.). By repealing this concession, may be these jobs may move back to the US.
I cannot think of any other case where this can be connected to job creation. I think this repeal is generally being associated with job creation just to avoid the negative publicity as another measure of increasing taxes (as he’s anyway increasing taxes for households and businesses earning above $250K).

So, will it not affect outsourcing in any way at all?

Not that I can think of.

So, is Obama’s tirade against outsourcing just empty rhetoric?

It is difficult to dismiss it that way as we don’t know what the other measures he’s thinking of to discourage outsourcing are. So, I think, at least in this case, this repeal of tax concession does not directly affect IT outsourcing.

I found it hard to believe when a colleague mentioned that Indian Railways has introduced side middle berths in most of the coaches of trains starting from Chennai. Middle berths themselves were new to people who travelled in meter gauge trains. When I first encountered them, I found them so inconvenient. They were good in the day time, but were inadequate to accomodate tall passengers.

When I made those journeys between home and hostel during my engineering days, I remember always trying to squeeze myself into the side berths and always ending up sleepy the next day. One consolation was that atleast the side berths had more vertical space when compared to the regular berths in sleeper coaches.

But now, Lalu, with an eye on short term profits, has introduced middle berths in all sleeper coaches. Just a look at a photo in the Hindu (4th December Madurai edition) made me feel claustrophobic! Without any change in passenger space or other amenities (like restrooms), they have managed to increase the number of passengers in a coach. In the day time, the additional passengers will sit in the regular lower berths, so each regular bay will accomodate 7 instead of 6 passengers while sitting. Moreover, I hear that even three tier AC coaches have not been spared. At a time when Indian Railways is drawing flak from outside on the design of its toilets, this clearly goes on to show the utter disregard for event basic hygiene and comfort for the passengers.

I read quite a few blogs of journalists or free lancers who claim to be in the vicinity of the Mumbai blasts. They claim that either they or their fellow journalists put professional duty over personal safety by insisting on proceeding to or being in one of the areas of Mumbai blasts and reporting from there.

I must say like many others I’m not impressed. To me, there are only two important activities that can happen around the area of the blasts. Either you have gun in your hand and fight the terrorists or you help out the injured or those holed out in some way. Reporting minute by minute incidents to a person like me sitting thousands of miles apart is not helping anyone on the ground there. Having a camera or a mic and running around only obstructs everyone else going about doing their duty. Seeing Barkha Dutt roaming around the place and talking with the authority that she’s used to makes any common sensical viewer puke. It was atrocious to see these people almost insert the mics into the mouths of people who had survived the ordeal and were coming out of one of the hotels. If I were one of them, I would have slapped Barkha as I came out.

Pray some one tell me what service these reporters are doing in these times. How are they any better than the curious bystanders trying to watch the “fun”? In fact these guys are worse - they obstruct other people from discharging their duties and try to make money out of others’ miseries. I sometimes feel there should be some restrictions on journalistic freedom in our country, especially during such disasters.

And while we are in this matter, none of the 24 hour English news channels reported the Chennai flooding in any way. I saw a headline in NDTV just before the Mumbai incident happened and after that there was nothing. It makes me wonder if there’s any use for a South Indian in watching these news channels.

Just 3 days after Manmohan announced the 100-day plan to tackle terrorism, the terrorists have spit and shat on his face and in an act of blatant mockery of the state and its security machinery, even managed to kill the Anti Terrorism Squad chief.

I’m only reminded of the sequence in Vijayakanth-starrer Ramana, where as a team of policemen use public address system to assure the public that they will be protected against kidnapping, they get an intimation that one of their own men has been kidnapped. The public then ridicule the police team by offering to escort the police team to their station.

I can understand when M.K.Narayan says that intelligence is an extremely difficult task, but what I fail to comprehend how a same place (and that too a premier city of the country) can be attacked over and over again. If the present government even had an iota of the combination of vekkam, maanam, soodu and soranai, it would admit its failure of even protect the basic right of its people - the right to live and resign. But, I guess that is not going to change anything on the ground as there is practically no better alternative.

With terrorists almost holding the entire country to ransom through the scary regularity of their bombings, one really wonders what these decision-makers are thinking. My feeling is intelligence and enquiry and all should come later. Some drastic measures have to be taken.

When I was in New York city sometime late 2002, the city still presented a war-like situation to its visitors. One could continuously hear the drone of helicopters flying around all the time, there were so many cops roaming around the city randomly, entry was restricted in so many areas and so on. Why can’t we do something more severe - ensure zero (or near zero) infiltration from Pakistan and Bangladesh (take all our troops there), restrict entry points to the major cities and enhance surveillance of all kinds of transportation entering the city, restrict entry of visitors into airports, railway station and all other public places and keep up this whole emergency kind of situation for a year.

I know there are logistic issues here - how many cities do you protect this way and so on and so forth. But shouldn’t something of this scale be carried out? When intelligence doesn’t click, use brute force. I’m just pained by the complete lack of action. The Home Minister appears like a dumb asshole everytime a bombing happens and we can ignore him if his personal failure doesn’t have such an impact. He’s there only because he can lick the asses of his bosses, who themselves cannot boast of anything better.

I just hope things don’t get back to normal and something systemic change happens within the next few days. But I know I’m hoping against hope.

If you get to the website of one of the premier organizations that administers around 1000 schools in India and that comes directly under the Union Home Ministry, you can view the salary of every single employee with all the breakdown details !!! They have a spreadsheet for each of the member schools in the network and all such spreadsheets put together list the salary structure of all of their 45,000 odd employees in detail. So much for privacy etc. And this from the government that is responsible for enacting IT privacy / security laws !!!

The introduction of Google Chrome into the already cluttered web browser market has enthused the web users and, as expected they are going ga-ga over it. I’m given to understand that an important feature in Chrome is that each browser tab is a separate process in Windows OS and hence, unlike how it happens in other browsers, if something causes a tab to crash, it does not crash the entire browser instance (with multiple tabs).

This brings me to the question of the usefulness of tabs in the first place. The tab feature was introduced into IE in version 7 (presumably taking a cue from the competing browsers) ostensibly to “reduce the clutter in the taskbar” that would be created by multiple browser instances. But the tabs prevent me from seeing the pages I have opened in my taskbar and also from doing one of the basic things I do when working with multiple windows - “Alt+Tab” to switch between windows. The former is also the reason I don’t use the “Group similar taskbar buttons” feature available in Windows XP as it doesn’t give me a good view of what is open. I also have the “Alt+Tab” problem when I work with multiple tabs or worksheets in a single spreadsheet. Of course, people can tell me that I can still use “Ctrl+Tab”, but it is not as useful as “Alt+Tab” simply because “Alt+Tab” orders the windows based on usage rather than on when the windows were created.

Even before IE introduced the tab feature, yahoo add-ons enabled the tab feature even in the earlier versions of IE. But I found the tabs more annoying than even a cluttered taskbar, so I never went for it. Tabs also seem to have the problem of a single tab crash bring down the whole browser instance with it, that Chrome claims to solve. To me this is akin to adding a bug in the code and adding a fix to solve the bug.

In the near future, I expect some new browser version to introduce a “new feature” of listing all browser tabs in the taskbar, defeating the very purpose of introduction of tabs .

I just happened to visit this blog : http://www.adityamohan.com/. The father of the child is a contributor to the Corporate blog of Infosys. The baby, 4.5 months old, lost its life in a Jet Airways flight from Toronto to Delhi. I cannot think of what the parents will be going through. Is there a way legally, through consumer court or something, to force Jet Airways answer his questions and actually identify the reason behind this mishap? I don’t know if this incident was covered well in the media.

During these international flights, especially the India-US ones, my heart really goes out for the infants, their parents and the aged people who go through the ordeal. More terrible would be to see mothers travelling alone with infants, or worse, with an infant and another kid. In my opinion, if a husband cannot accompany his wife and kids in an international travel, he should have either not gone abroad or not married.

If the above incident affected you, you can sign the online petition here. I’m not sure how it will help though.