I have never been good in free-hand drawing or colouring. Other than Plays and oratory competitions, Arts and Crafts were always distant skills for me right from my school days. In fact I hated Biology classes in School and Engineering Drawing in Graduation just because they required me to the draw. I could getaway without drawing from my teachers, but I couldn't from my son. Two weeks back on a weekend he wanted me to draw Tractor Tom - how much ever I tried to convince him that I can't draw he didn't agree.  So here is what I managed and below that the original image of Tractor Tom (as seen in DVD):

In the afternoon there was a lively session by TV fame (Cricket Commentator) Harsha Bhogle. He was representing his management consultancy firm Prosearch Consultants. The talk was on T20 Cricket game and the differences of the format with One-Day / Test cricket. The title was very apt as the Microsoft Event was also titled "Together To Outperform - T2O". Harsha drew brilliant parallels (in a extremely light manner) between T20 as a sport and situations in today's corporate world.

He was extremely hilarious, throwing many funny punch lines, few of them below:

- All Good Lines are Unfair (including whatever I just now said)

- He didn't have time (came that fast) to drop the ball

Amongst the points he covered:

- The T20 format demands that "Performance on the Day matters, not reputation", "Shape up or ship out", "Any team can win, no underdogs", "No time for course correction". In T20 you need Wartime leaders and not Peacetime managers.

- When you have right partnerships, the sum of 1 + 1 can be 3. Like Paes/Bupathi, West Indies Past bowler pack including Malcolm Marshall (they hunted like a pack, it was We over Me), Cycle champion Armstrong and his US Postal team colleagues who went before him uphill and he rode on their slipstream

-Unlike earlier formats in Cricket,  in T20 you had to go after audience and advertise. You have to excite people on their second identity (apart from an Indian) which was of their city/region. This was a litmus test, which IPL passed. 

- Players in IPL T20 were not needed to be trained, you paid (bought) for them - just like in business with 30% attrition rates today why will you want to train, you will only want to hire from others . You could source talent not locally but from around the world, so your incentive for training got reduced in IPL T20.

- Another thing that IPL T20 did was to put world champions and unknown local players in the same team. They had to get together and work as a team nearly overnight. They didn't have any bonding glues - no common heritage, no common geography, no common in experience; still had to perform as a team.

- Marketing was new to cricket with T20. You had owners from 3 diverse fields came together - Cricket, Film & Business houses.

Switching on to serious subjects discussed during the Partner Summit:

• I heard this nice management quote "Accelerate at corners", that's what F1 champions do. Everyone can accelerate in straight road and everyone slows down in corners, that's an opportunity for you to accelerate". The famous Lance Armstrong,rides on the rider's slip stream in front of him
• In India especially in E-Governance the discussions mostly are hijacked by technology arguments. It has to be debated on outcome and objectives
• In India for education there is no dearth of funds for education related IT. It is about sustainability and proving their effectiveness
• Microsoft India on their part through Project Shiksha have trained over 265,000 teachers over last 4 years, each for a minimum of 15 days
  

In the evening today there was a Bollywood play "All the Best" directed by distinguished director "Feroz Khan". I was hoping it will be in English as my understanding of Hindi is extremely limited, and I will certainly not be able to appreciate a Comedy Play in Hindi. The play did turn out to be in Hindi, but since the play had a mute character there was lot of hand gestures and body language so I could understand it well and was able to have split laughs as well. The appreciation should go to the four excellent actors (Iqbal Azad, Kikoo Sharda, Kranti Redkar and Vikas Kadam) who performed brilliantly on the stage.

The play deals with three friends, one blind, the other deaf and third mute, who all fall for the same girl.

If this comes to your town, don't miss it.

For a Microsoft event I am staying here at Renaissance in Mumbai (A Mariott Hotel) and they allotted me a room in the newly constructed (nearly complete) Renaissance Towers - like in Software we were made to beta test the towers!.

In the morning when I got up and went for my bath - surprise, no running water. The housekeeping didn't even have an estimate of when they will have it repaired and they didn't even show a sign of remorse for their poor service. I had to do a "Luxury" act of brushing my teeth with bottled water, then with the help of perfumes and a set of clean clothes  I went for my breakfast meeting. I was feeling a little better that the person I met was also staying in the Towers and couldn't have his bath either

After an hour, water supply was restored but that too only Warm Water - no Cold Water!

For last two days I am attending Microsoft India Partner Summit titled "T20" at Mumbai. Yesterday there was a written quiz on Microsoft Virtualization , I attempted just for fun. Generally I am not lucky to win any prizes, but today was my day.

In the morning they announced my name as one of the winners for XBOX 360, I was happy to collect it. On my way back to my room I was invited to a game show where they had questions on Windows Live/Vista/IE 8 and were giving prizes up to 10 Grams of Gold. I played and answered a simple question on Windows Live (being a Windows Live MVP does help) and won a 2GB USB Thumb-Drive.

Since I got my prize, I helped the gentleman next to me to answer the next question and he won the 10 Grams of Gold

More than 70% of Indian IT Exports are to United States and exports outside of United States as well are mostly priced in US Dollars (USD). So the movement of USD with respect to Indian Rupee (INR) is of paramount importance to the industry. The economical concept at play here is very simple, gains made by USD are better for us - we get to make more Rupees per Dollar of revenue. In other words we favour INR to depreciate. This is directly opposite to what the Indian Government and other importers will desire - as for every dollar they import they have to pay more Rupee. Government is the largest importer especially of Oil which is mostly priced in Dollars.

Unlike the bigger players in the Industry, SME companies like Vishwak have little room to maneuver to get end customer prices (marked in USD) increased, most of the time our contract prices are negotiated a year in advance. We can improve productivity and reduce operational costs, but their impact is limited to few percentage points, nowhere near the 10% swing that has happened in the last one year in Dollar value. Till about few months we were worried due to strengthening of Rupee, but in the last two quarters the trend reversed. Today the Dollar hit a high note of Rs. 44.89, compared to Rs.40.63 exactly a year before - exactly a 10% swing the other way. One of the financial instruments available for exporters is Forward contract (Hedging).

Forward Contract: It is a contract between the bank and its customers in which the exchange/conversion of currencies would take place at a future date at a rate of exchange agreed in advance under a contract. The essential idea of entering into a forward contract is to peg the price and thereby avoid the price risk.

RBI allows you to take these forward contracts for next 12 months (sliding window). Like many other SMEs at Vishwak we normally cover say 60-70% of our receivables for next 12 months. This has been helping us when the Dollar kept depreciating like it did for the first half of this year and whole of last year. But since the trend reversed in the last two quarters we have started losing nearly Rs.4 per dollar (10%) - of course this risk was always there just like in any other financial instruments. Our Hedging taken last year (in July/August '07 for July '08 and so on) for this financial year (Apr '08 to Mar '09) has been at various levels around Rs.39 to Rs.41, but the current rate is Rs.44.89.

This made me interested to dig into this a little deeper, so I headed to RBI's archive site and pulled out last 13 months data and plotted it into a chart in Excel (you can download the excel sheet I prepared from here). Below is the chart - you can see clearly the wild swings of Dollar.

I noticed the following few points of interest from the above chart:

1. Dollar made a decline from Rs.41.24 to Rs.39.91 between 29/Aug/07 to 20/Sep/07. Nearly Rs.1.33 change.
2. Continued to stay in the band of Rs.39 for next 7 months till 23/Apr/08
3. Dollar made a rise from Rs.39.95 to Rs.42.56 between 23/Apr/08 to 26/May/08. Nearly Rs.2.61 change.
4. Dollar made a rapid rise from Rs.42.82 to Rs.44.21 in just 15 days between 14/Aug/08 to 01/Sep/08. Nearly Rs.1.39 change.
5. Dollar continues to rise with hitting a high note at Rs.44.89 today

This sunday I watched this movie - Click by Adam Sandler. Many of the English movies are now available in India at affordable rates - this one (VCD) distributed by Sony Music India costs me Rs.299 (USD 7).

The story is a powerful one, something that all of us would have felt in our lives more than once - that is to have a remote control to skip unpleasant moments (or) play again the happy occasions. Unfortunately, the director of the movie Frank Coraci has missed this opportunity to exploit the story line to his advantage. He has given an average movie. The initial half an hour or so was certainly boring and the place where he gets this universal remote control that changes his live forever could have been better. The last half an hour where the incidents that unfold makes Michael Newman (acted by Adam Sandler) realize the consequences of having such a device are certainly taken well. Where he talks about work-live balance, the Director has avoided being too philosophical or toeing religious lines.

Should you watch this movie, yes if you don't have any other choice (or) you are stuck on a plane. 

Bill Gates is my inspiration in technology and I love Jerry Seinfeld shows, so what more better than seeing both of them together in a hilarious clip. It doesn't matter it was a commercial from Microsoft - did it?

 
[Watch the low-bandwidth version here]

Watch the above clip which is the first of a series of advertisement campaigns coming from Microsoft featuring Jerry Seinfeld. If this is the answer to hugely successful "Mac vs Windows" advertisements from Apple, I think Microsoft is on the right path. I think the beauty of this pilot is that it has no direct references to Windows Vista or any Microsoft Products (Read here what The Register has to say on this).

If you have tried to do a decent chart or graph or any line drawings in HTML/CSS you would have felt extremely frustrated, more so you want it to be cross-browser compatible. Though SVG and VML have been around for years, the support for them is not uniform between browsers. Recently in a newsletter from Sitepoint I came across Raphaël - a small JavaScript library (less than 19Kb in filesize) written by Dmitry Baranovskiy of Atlassian, that allows you to create and manipulate vector graphics in your web pages. It's simple to use and supports Internet Explorer 6.0+, Safari 3.0+, Firefox 3.0+, and Opera 9.5+. Internally Raphaël uses VML in IE and SVG in the other browsers.

Raphaël is published under MIT License which basically allows you to use the code in both commercial and non-commercials applications and even redistribute freely (as in free beer).

To do the above graph, you need to write only 30 lines of Javascript. Check it out.

The famous low price shopping destination in Chennai - Saravana Stores in Ranganathan Street (T.Nagar) unfortunately has got into flames from early morning today. From my house which is 1 or 2 kilometres from the site, standing on our water tank in 2nd floor we could clearly see the massive fumes. It is unfortunate that 20 of their employees who went in to control flames are yet to come out and are expected to be in danger - our prayers for their safe exit. About 5 to 6 fire engines from nearby and several of the firemen are fighting to control the flames.