Tag: Personal

Citizenship in a Democracy

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Voting day in Mumbai is always a heated affair.

By late afternoon, the voting turnout has been pretty low. In fact, it was lesser than 30% at 1pm. This benchmark is a pretty poor number for one of the most populated cities in this country, if not the world.

Why, then this low figure? There could be multiple reasons for this which most readers will rattle off!

High temperatures

With temperatures touching the high 30s and humidity in the high 90s, the sweltering heat feels like a suffocating blanket on everything. If you have been outside these days without the safety of the office AC, you will feel the continuous sapping of energy and always feel dehydrated at the end of every excursion outside the cool interiors.

Working offices

Section 135B exists, but only in principle. Most offices in Mumbai and other metropolitan cities have been working throughout the day, with a half-day being given to employees.

The problem with this specific clause is that for those employees who actually want to vote the leave is not really needed, and for those who do not want to vote, the leave is just an additional leave. Hence most companies are choosing to interpret it as such – you apply for a leave, and it shall be granted, however coming to office and pushing off early won’t be considered as a half day.

Long weekend

With elections in Mumbai being planned on Monday and the paid holiday for employees pretty much guarantees everyone a three-day long weekend to plan their trips.

Having to come back from their weekend trips to stand in long queues in this heat is something that a lot of people may not look forward to.

Having said that, why citizenship in the title?

Voting should be an act of citizenship

The reason is simple. I believe that by choosing to actively participate in the election of the world’s largest democracy, all of us are making the choice of being a citizen.

Being a citizen doesn’t necessarily mean simply standing in a queue and casting your vote in a ballot box. It means, actively working towards the organizational goals of the country.

Sadly, this is a trait that hasn’t been inculcated in a lot of people. Folks simply do not know what citizenship is or what does it mean to be a citizen.

I am providing a video of what I think acting like a citizen entails. It doesn’t stop at voting, it has a much more engaged definition.

As the markets went in their roller coaster, and eventually normalcy returned, I cannot help but think that even though the elections went by pretty smoothly – our citizens haven’t really changed.

WordCamp Ahmedabad 2023

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After attending WordCamp Mumbai this year, I decided to keep attending more WordCamps throughout India. As luck would have it, Ahmedabad was just around the corner and I did my booking. WordPress is also used as a quick fix for landing pages in advertising, and hence I thought it would be a good exercise for Harshaja to attend, hoping that she meets some competent (and affordable) WordPress agency to handle the development side of things at 13 Llama‘s end. That, and the super interesting schedule that Ahmedabad had put up.

Getting to Ahmedabad

We chose to take the early morning flight to Ahmedabad. That just meant that the day of the event would be super long for us. Since we hardly knew any folks in the city, this was an easy decision to make. I personally wanted to stay and do some site seeing in this city, but no harm – we could always hop by on one of our annual trips to Vadodara.

The flight was short and getting off the airport and into the cab was one of the smoothest exits we have had. Carrying everything in an overnight handbag does have its advantages!

Venue: Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University

One of the supercool things that struck me during this event was the way Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University (BAOU) was setup. Within a 30 minute drive from the airport, the venue is a sprawling university campus that had access to multiple halls, classrooms, and a great open space where the attendees could congregate in.

I honestly cant imagine the cost of such a large sized venue in Mumbai.

Attendees

We thought that instead of checking-in at the hotel, we would directly attend the event and during the breaks in the afternoon do a quick run to the hotel and finish the checkin process. Thus we directly stopped over at the BAOU campus.

At a little bit earlier than 8am, I was expecting the organizers to be just about gathering and deciding on how they want to execute the rest of the day. To my surprise, there was the beginnings of a crowd already gathering.

What ended up as a small crowd quickly grew to a large congregation, with over 1100 attendees, the WordCamp Ahmedabad 2023 was the second largest WordCamp in Asia, second only to WordCamp Asia!!

I could not help but compare this large audience to what we had in Mumbai. This was more than double the audience of Mumbai and then some!

Talks and Speakers

One thing that always strikes me is that every WordCamp I learn something new. Something that helps me in the future years. Even this time, one of the highlights of the event was the last talk by Nirav Mehta. This one was on public speaking and one of the reasons why I had made sure that the both of us were there to attend.

Some of the other notable talks were on Link Building by an agency owner, Custom Blocks by Amartya Gaur, Yoast’s acquisition by Chaya Oosterbroek. It’s uncanny that even when my functional domain has completely changed, I still took a bunch of learning back from the event!

Ahmedabad, you beauty!

As the day came to an end, I could not help but get overwhelmed with the vibrant PHP developer community that I could see in Ahmedabad. It’s definitely larger and more vocal than the Mumbai community and thus would always be one of the factors for us if we were to open a secondary development office. In fintech, I am seeing more companies shift their technical operations to T2 and T3 cities like Ahmedabad and how!

આવજો

Tying up loose ends

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

I consider most phases of my life (and of my career) as specific projects. Projects which have a certain outcome tied to them. Projects which need metrics to track and project closures which have targets to reach.

In this obsession to be objective about things, I got involved in a couple of projects which were of subjective nature.

What are subjective projects?

Subjective projects are those where the progress of that project is dependant on individual opinions and feelings. An example of such a topic could be Career.

Career fulfillment is a subjective thing. For some people a fulfilling career might be a one which involves loads of payment, for some it might involves getting respect from peers, others might look at impact. You get the drift?

It’s not even about individual feelings as well. As a person supporting a family, the subjectivity is made more complex by not only your belief of a fulfilling career, but also your immediate family’s.

Suddenly, that one question – What does your son do for a living? becomes real.

As a parent, I would love some bragging rights about my children’s achievements. That may or may not be aligned with what my children want to do. So, the moot question was how to go about objectively defining success for a subjective topic.

Numbers help

Some key measures of success do help. Let’s stick with the Career example –

  • My son makes a lakh a month
  • I manage a team of 6
  • My daughter has been working with GDFC Bank for over a decade
  • She got an 20% salary hike this year
  • My son runs his own company that employs 100 individuals
  • I wan’t to be able to take atleast 10 days off in a year to interesting destinations around the world

What’s the problem with this subjectivity?

And here’s my problem with this subjectivity thing. It freaking keeps changing the measure of success!

Sometimes it’s years of experience, sometimes it’s people employed, sometimes it’s cash in hand … and there is no clear metric you optimize things for.

The problem in this world, is where the team which decides the success of this subjectivity has not taken the pains of articulating What is Success.

When this is not articulated enough, you tend to optimize Career (in this example) on some parameters which might be an implicit rubric for you, but may not be understood by everyone else. Hence, the need to articulate.

Another example

Here’s one more example which works for most people.

What’s a good life mean for you?

Can you put down metrics on which if you measure your life, you will be able to answer this question?

If yes (and I haven’t done this yet), then are you doing anything which helps you increase those measues?

In life, or in our Career (my last example), we have these tiny niggling doubts at the back of our mind. These are the loose ends I am talking about.

Can we use metrics and measures to answer and squash these doubts. I think so, but to get there, we need to have a definition of what are our measures of success. I used to post my yearly resolutions for a couple of years on this blog, and then I stopped. Primarily, because of this subjective struggle. No one cared how many posts did I put up on the blog (not even me!), so how did it matter that I post one a week or more.

Measure for closure

So, what are good measures of success for the year 2017 for me? And what would the year 2018 be measured against. Well, that’s what I have a month to figure out!

PS – This is a thought experiment I am doing to see if I can indeed wield measurements and analytics for improvement. It’s a belief that I have long held close to my heart, now I am putting it to the test. Those who know me would know that I am fundamentally lazy and putting in these measurements as a life practice involves a certain discipline. That is my personal challenge.

Owning a Car or taking an Uber

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Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of Uber, built his cab-hailing startup with one ambitious goal: to stop people from buying cars. And while his ultimate goal could well be achieved globally, India would remain an exception. New research by Swiss investment bank UBS says that ride-on-demand (RoD) apps won’t stop Indians from buying their own…

via The simple reason why Uber and Ola can’t deter Indians from owning cars — Quartz

The investment bank UBS research might be saying that Indians still want a car, however, I still prefer taking an Uber ride over driving. Here’s why –

  • I can sit and read while the car is happily en route to my destination. Taking calls and thinking through things is a breeze.
  • Labor as well as Time & Material are saved
  • Dependency on cash is more or less removed. After demonetization, I have reduced my cash dependency completely, and I am loving it.
  • Whereas, its great to have a car and a driver handy to do on random jaunts like drop the kids to school, go for shopping, et al … however, an on the spot Uber is almost as good

Indians would treat the car as a status symbol, perhaps in the interiors they still do – however, with parking space coming at a premium (last I checked, a parking space in Nariman point as expensive as a 15 Lakh INR) taking an Uber is just more convenient.

2016 – A Year in Review

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

As the year whittles down to a close, I’d like to look back towards both the highs and the lows of this year. Hopefully, I can then celebrate more such highs and try not to repeat the mistakes of the past year. Of course, it’d be great to bury all the proverbial hatchets and move on – perhaps this post (or if not this) is just that! Continue reading “2016 – A Year in Review” →