My New Blog

This is just to 'officially' change my IIM related blogs from http://mareers.blogspot.com/ to http://iimlife.blogspot.com/

Today as I was going through my Blogger Dashboard I found out my long lost blog. Now here was an address which I was lucky to get it (and surprising, considering the fact that this is an id someone would love to have but would be difficult to get). I was in a dilemma whether to keep my old (this) blog or throw it away for the new one. There was a Tamil ad which went something like, 'yaen, rendume irukka koodatha' (why not both)?

So, here I am, proclaiming the arrival of my new blog. I would continue posting about general stuff here and IIM related stuff in the other blog.

The Metro Man of India

There have been quite a few occasions when I had to change my perception about a person or event after getting first-hand information. That happened once when we here at IIM Indore got a chance to interact with Shri. Ranil Wickremasinghe during the course of a guest talk. More recently (February 9, 2007), we had a guest talk by Mr. Sreedharan, India's Metro Man. This talk gave a lot of insight into how the Delhi Metro Rail Project was completed successfully well within the deadline, an unusual feat in India considering the amount of red tapism happening in the Indian bureaucratic system.



The very fact that Mr. Sreedharan has spearheaded the successful implementation of many big Government projects (Konkan Railway and Delhi Metro) after his retirement from Government service shows how being a straightforward person pays in the long run. His achievements even before his retirement is by no standards lower, considering the engineering skills involved.

What's Sreedharan's secret of success? During the course of the talk, he gave a five-point formula which he religiously practises.

• Punctuality

The fact that for every day of delay, the project cost would rise by Rs. 1.6 crores made DMRC employees dedicate their full energy into the project. Use of reverse-time clocks, which indicated the days left to complete each phase of the project acted as a source of constant pressure to always be on the toes. The employees of DMRC also had to be punctual, with the introduction of smart cards to log in/out the employees. This practice rubbed off on the Delhi Metro trains which are at the maximum late by 60 seconds, something unheard of even in metros of developed countries.

• Honesty

Sreedharan pointed out that at no point of time he bowed to the 'pressures' from the Indian bureaucrats. After a point, even the politicians had come to the view that this is a person with whom they can't play politics. In the end, it was a win-win situation for everyone. As another instance of honesty, he mentioned the speed of execution of tenders - the whole process from notification to the opening of bids to the final selection took no more than 5 hours - something which was achievable only due to honesty in work.

• Corporate Structure

For a company, which is a JV between Indian and Delhi Governments, following corporate structure is indeed surprising. DMRC has it's own vision, mission and corporate culture. All it's employees are government servants, but are known for their professionalism. The company as a whole is lean, with a Chairman, MD and few directors at top. The points of inefficiencies - namely peons and clarks are eliminated, save for the top level management. Every week begins with Monday meetings (there is no particular agenda, no minutes of meeting etc) where the targets for the current week is discussed, and ends with a Friday review meeting. All this shows how professional DMRC is.

• Health

As the adage goes "Health is Wealth", Sreedharan was convinced that only if the employees came to work fully fit would it be possible to successfully complete the project on time. By pursuing this, the medical/hospitalisation expenses of the company went down drastically.

• Integrity

What is the net effect of all this? An improvement in traffic speeds in Delhi from 12 to 18 kmph. Reduction in accidents. Clean and efficient mode of transportation. A successful model which even New York is envious of and is trying to emulate. Least hindrance to public - no disruption of water, electricity or telephone line. In the end, it's been a win-win situation for everyone.

There were quite a few questions raised. One question was about an incident which he would have liked to change during the execution of the project. Pat came the reply that he would have loved to have one station named as Connaught Place instead of Rajiv Gandhi Station. There was another question about how he was planning to execute Phase II of the project which has twice the work and half the time as compared to Phase I. His answer about moving beyond the learning curve and assigning the execution of each stretch of the project to different engineer so that the whole project is completed in parallel made good sense.

Sreedharan's future plans? He's chugging along the path of the completion of Phase II of Delhi Metro. DMRC has a long term goal of connecting the New Delhi Airport with the Metro before the 2010 Commonwealth games and an even longer term goal of having a Metro station within 1 km of every Delhi citizen's home by 2021. (A map of the full network in 2021)

I had two questions which somehow I couldn't ask.
One was about the technicalities of the project. Phase I was executed on broad gauge while the remaining phases are to be executed in standard gauge. How an interconnection possible then?
Second, and more important was on the future of DMRC. What is the corporate structure in place which will ensure that DMRC will continue to have a professional structure in place and upheld it's core values even after Mr Sreedharan leaves the organisation? Is DMRC very much dependent on a single person to identify itself with the core values?

MS-Word for posting Blogs? NEVER!!!

The previous post might have been amusing for some people, but had it been successful it'd have made life easier for lazy bums like me. The use of MS-Word for posting into the blog is a waste of time, and risky too.

1. To post pictures into the blog, the URL of image provider is needed. Somehow I couldn't find this address for Blogspot. Some may suggest that pictures can be posted using Picassa, but that's another waste of time. I can post max of 1 picture per blog through Picassa.
2. Thinking myself to be very smart, I just inserted some pictures, some Word Art and some graphs into the Word document assuming that it'll somehow be displayed on the blog. This was an utter failure.
3. Use of special formatting like dotted underline, double strikethrough and special effects like shadow, engrave and emboss seem to work fine in the Word Doc, but not in the final post. However subscripts, superscripts and normal formatting stuffs like bold, italics, highlighting etc were working fine.
4. Special characters like Greek alphabets, sadly were converted to English alphabets.
5. Last, but the most important, posting a blog from MS-Word is very very risky. Anyone can actually monitor and find out the User Name and Password - the data is sent through an unencrypted connection.

Conclusion: The underlying principle of wysiwyg is lost if one uses MS-Word. Add to this the security risks, I wonder why such an option was provided in MS-Word.

And more important, is there a way to post blogs directly from a client application residing on my comp? Not the "Performancing" stuff that comes as an add-on with Firefox. It's too cumbersome. I'm looking for something similar to a Word application from where I'll be able to post whatever I want.

Posting Blog through MS-Word

This is just a post to test if I'm able to post my blog directly from MS-Word. If this works I'll save a lot of time taken to login through www.blogspot.com, entering User Name and Password, and then formatting the stuff etc.

However, I can deem this successful only if I can see the things below.

1.

2.

 

3.

Pack
my
box
with
five
^dozen
_juicy liquor bags.

4.

 

5.

6.

7.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

8.

 

Let's check the result in my blog!

CSI Chapter at IIM Indore

Weeks of hard work finally paid off with the successful launch of the Computer Society of India - IIM Indore Student Chapter on February 3, 2007. It all began last year with the enrolment of our senior batch of students into the folds of CSI. The inauguration of the Chapter should technically have taken place last year itself, but somehow it failed to materialise. However, this year, with the renewed dynamism showed by the present 1st year students of Infinit-I - the IT Club of IIM Indore (of which I happened to be a member) along with the guidance from the seniors and faculties, we were able to finally launch the Chapter.

Mr. Lalit Sawhney - CSI President inaugurated the Chapter. Dr. S. P. Parashar - Director of IIM Indore, Mr. Upendra Giri - CEO AstroWix and Dr. M. Scalem - Professor at IIM Indore were present at the inauguration.

The event got national coverage from leading newspapers like Business Line and Hindustan Times, and from some regional newspapers like Dainik Bhaskar and Nai Duniya.

Some snaps from the event...


Chief guests (L to R): Dr. Scalem, Dr. Parashar, Mr. Sawhney, Mr. Giri


Lighting of the traditional lamp


Launch of CSI - IIMI Website

We kicked off the activities of the Chapter with a workshop on Enterprise Project Management along with a live demonstration of Microsoft Project 2003, conducted by Mr. Upendra Giri.


Upendra in action, students in rapt attention

The whole exercise of organising this event was a bittersweet experience for me. The day following the event, we had elections for members of the interest clubs, which I somehow didn't manage to win. However, there were a lot of new experiences for me. This was the first time I'm trying my hand at organising an event. The fact that almost everything went on perfectly, except for some hiccups here and there, made me very happy.

But more than this; even more than the praises that came our way, what I treasured the most was the new bond of friendship that I got to make during the weeks of hardship that I had to go through to make this whole event a grand success.