Who? Me??

I had meant to write this for quite some time, was putting it off – my periodic procrastination at work

The day I read through this article (an NGO for every 400 Indians), it was enough to spew forth a series of questions … questions aimed at people who work in NGOs and those who invest in them. With 3.3 million NGOs (the registered number in 2009), what impact has it really done to the country? At a micro-level, I agree that NGOs would be making a difference to the concerned community, but at what cost?

Do we (the nation) really have so many problems that it is taking so many NGOs to work? Imagine the amount of funding and human capital that must be going into these. I know folks who work for NGOs, and they take this funding for granted. This is the most appalling thing!! What gives you the self-righteous attitude to demand charity? (You can expect, but the day you demand I give you the bird).

The only way an NGO should sustain themselves, is not through charity, but through generating their own revenues. If the wealth of the nation is spent on giving to the needy, then the needy will never stand on their feet – they will just spread their arms more open.

Why can’t NGOs have business models and start being sustainable? Smart people will now talk about Social Entrepreneurship … what really gets my goat here, is that how is it any different from entrepreneurship? But that’s fodder for a different post.

Personally speaking, the reason why I do not give alms is that charity is a disabling act. When you give charity, it is a positive reinforcement of the fact that begging gives you livelihood. Once a person starts begging, the first thing he loses is his dignity, and then he loses his capability … downhill thereafter.

I truly believe in -

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Whenever a beggar approaches me, I offer them work instead of money. Sadly, none of them has yet to take up the offer.

In case you are wondering why the reduced frequency in posts, that’s because I have taken up part time blogging at a site which I have frequented and grown to love over the past couple of years. It is Crazy Engineers.

You can read the rest of the announcement here.

Guess I will have to plan my time better so that both the blogs are not neglected.

I was unaware of the fact that JK Rowling (the author of the very popular Harry Potter series) holds an honorary degree from the Harvard Business School. So it came as a surprise when I chanced upon her Commencement speech at the HBS Alumni meet.

An excerpt -

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

JK Rowling talks about how she looked at her failures to give her strength. To give her the courage to follow the road less trodden. Failure takes away all the unnecessary things, giving the individual focus and clarity. No wonder they say that failures are the pillars of success.

A parting note (quoting JK Rowling who was quoting Seneca)  -

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I think everyone who is aspiring to make it big should go through that speech. Success is not something that happens overnight, and without a certain clarity of purpose, it is very hard to succeed.

I have posted earlier on Twitter as well, but this time, its for a more practical purpose. It is on how to use this web tool to market your site online, to get those readers/customers to your portal. Social media is a powerful thing, and using it to promote your product/service online at minimal cost is even better

So here are a few ways you can use twitter to tweet your way to more hits.

1. Have an RSS Feed on your site, if it is content based, eg. Crazy Engineers, put that RSS in Twitterfeed, and push out regular updates through twitter! Similar updates can then be sent to your twitter of your blog/corporate blog as well.
2. Once you have your twitter account setup and your tweets are flowing a-go-go, then you can have your social networking accounts like Facebook, to display the same tweet.
3. Take care not to over do the feeds, since your followers can get bugged with you. I know a few friends who have complained of me tweeting of what songs I am listening to and all that jazz, so keep a filter on those feeds.
4. It also helps if you are tweeting every once in a while by yourself, so you get a more human face. For eg. Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh is there on twitter, and he actively tweets about his daily routine. How cool is that, direct access to a firms CEO, can you be more customer-centric?
5. Use twitter for simple market surveys, qualitative and quantitative as well. For eg. You can tweet, “What do you think is going to happen to the Indian economy?”, the answers would be more than enough to put forth a blog post. Later, you can tweet that post url, and there is a likely chance that people who participated in your twitisurvey would also read your post
6. This latest in: Use twitter to resign!!

Try it out, give twitter a twhirl!!