Two Thousand Eight

Indians Are Privately Smart and Publicly Dumb

An interview with V. Raghunathan, former professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, on his book "Games Indians Play: Why We Are the Way We Are"

Walking A Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

Good News !

I got my money back ... Thank God, the world still has a few good people left.

Victim of debit card fraud

3 weeks back I received a call from my credit union's fraud alert department asking me to check on a four transactions - ATM withdrawals from Spain amounting to ~$1200. Obvisouly, I did not make these transactions, neither did I give out my debit card number and/or PIN voluntarily to anyone. So, this rep on the phone asked me to file a dispute to get back my money. I did so.

What happened ? I received a mail from their Operations Analysis dept. saying investigation is complete and that the transactions in questions were NOT UNAUTHORIZED. Incredibly dumb and shocking !!!

So, I called the CSR to find out what happened...I had to talk to 2 of these CSR's before they told me to wait for a call from their fraud alert dept. I received the call from them today - guess what - I get a hostile voice on the other end of the line - saying I gave out the debit card number and PIN...again the same story...so this time they said they have a recorded conversation on me giving out these details to their repr. --- !??!

(How to) Find a Mentor to Enhance Your Career

If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain,
If you want ten years of prosperity,grow trees,
If you want one hundred years of prosperity,grow people.

Lunch with the world's Climate Chief and Nobel Laureate: Rajendra Pachauri

Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann on Theory of Everything

Cisco's new CTO

Deadwood from Motorola - Padmasree Warrior, fills vacant CTO role at Cisco last held by Charlie Giancarlo.

In India, a terrible place to be born a girl

In November, India was ranked 114th out of 128 nations in a gender-gap survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, scoring poorly on equality in education, health and the economy. Unicef used three statistical parameters - the age at which girls are married off, the level of female literacy and the imbalance between the number of boys and girls - when it judged that there is no unluckier spot than Shravasti for a girl.