Private Conversations

Over the last 20 years, people have adapted to conversing online. You can send messages to anybody anywhere and anytime, and they in turn can message back in real time or when they are free. With the Covid-19 outbreak this has become even more common. Distributed families in even in the same cities haven't seen each other for months, and instead use web and mobile applications to keep in touch.

There has been one aspect that has been continuously evolving - security. Initially the internet was designed as an open protocol, made more for sharing and referencing information, rather than locking it down. However as people's digital signature became larger and they share more details about themselves, the aspect of control has been evolving. Some of the early internet companies (yes I'm considering you - Google and Facebook) based their entire business model on ads with the exploitation of individual data, thus distorting the ethical fabric of the internet. As I wrote in a previous blog 7 years ago, any centralised accumulation of user data becomes a target for other agencies, mostly unethical. 

Notably, companies like Apple have realised this and pivoted towards enabling individual control of their data. It probably helps that their business model does not depend on selling your data. There are many aspects to modern tech usage that need to be re-engineered towards a more private and secure model. 

In the end, if you were to whisper something into someone's ear, you don't intend that to be available openly on the internet - forever. Digital reputations are something not easily reset.

What brings me back to this topic, is a WhatsApp application terms-of-reference update that stipulates that users are now required to share their data with the parent company Facebook. If one has been following Facebook over the years, then one can see they originate from a hacker mentality and culture - "better to seek forgiveness later, than ask permission". Thus their aim has been to exploit all data at their disposal to advance themselves competitively and financially, at the expense of a moral compass. It is funny to see former employees of Facebook, now becoming older, coming out and being apologetic and advising caution in using Facebook. On the other hand online users have been happy to give away their privacy in exchange for ease of use and dopamine driven programming. 

Starting in Feb, WhatsApp will begin sharing all kinds of data with Facebook. They just killed their best feature - privacy.

Please no longer text me on WhatsApp. Download @signalapp

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) January 10, 2021

WhatsApp's founders intended for it to be an ad-free completely privacy-driven messaging service. Most of us in Information Tech sector knew that was over once Facebook bought WhatsApp. Somehow WhatsApp's founders fooled themselves that their original intentions for the application would be maintained. I'm sure the enormous pay-out they received helped cement the illusion.

In my globally distributed family, we have been big users of WhatsApp, but now I'm advocating for everyone to shift to something else. It can be hard to do. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and once they have overcome the learning curve of one application, most are reluctant to switch.

There are more evolved privacy-conscious messenger candidates out there. The one I'm switching to at the moment and advocating is Signal. It cannot be purchased by another big player. It is secure, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted. It is also endorsed by most of the smart players - Edward Snowden, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk among others. A more detailed look is provided in the following video:

Here's how to set it up on Android:

And how to set it up on Apple:

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How to: Add comments to Google Photos

Google photos is one of the best organizing, sharing and collaborating apps for your photo library.

Seeing old photographs can trigger recall of lost memories, details around the events captured in he photograph. Best thing to do is to note these associated memories down immediately before they get lost again in the hurried mindscape of everyday living. The easy method of doing this noted below:

While on computer

1. Go to the particular photo on the Google Photos site. You'll probably already be looking at it.

2. Move the mouse down to the 'comments' icon as show in above pictures, and click on it
3. Write your comment down in the text box and click the send or Arrow button.

On a Mobile or Tablet

1. Go to the particular photo on the Google Photos App.
2. You'll probably already be looking at it
3. Find the 'comment' icon, and click on it (see pictures above)

4. Write your comment and click 'Send' button, same as you would for a 'text' or 'SMS' message

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Kipling for the times

In these times of existential crisis, and change in behaviour, there is a lot of stress floating around. I found a poem by the great Rudyard Kipling speaking to the times. Following are relevant extracts

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs …	Stay calm Stay centered
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating	Patience during lockdown Avoid and don't spread opinions; follow science, follow facts Remain compassionate
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:	Life is full of ups and downs, don't fret Facts get twisted, untwist them Things that get broken, we'll fix and rebuild them

For the full poem by Rudyard Kipling read here.

City to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis - as far as the eye can see

Aerial views of New Delhi, India, which has a population density of 30,000 people per square mile, show the sheer number of humans living on top of each other. (Business Insider)

Travelling by train from Delhi to Punjab and back, at least once a year, is something I have done since I was born. The distance between my mother’s family and my father’s was covered by the trusty North-Western Indian Railway, but the journey has changed each year that I have made it. Twenty years ago, we could drink the water straight from the many public taps, eat the delicious food hand-made from the various stalls by jolly gents, served in small bowls made from dried leaves. Sip tea in earthern clay cups which one could later smash, almost ceremonially, on the tracks without impacting the environment. There was a substantial feeling of space, of cooler fresher air, cleaner sunshine. The population of India then was a bit over 780,000.

Now it is approaching double that figure - at the time of writing about 1.3 billion. The population graph is an unsustainable exponential, with unthinkable consequences. The train journey of my childhood is very different now, impacts of crowding, resource pressure, commercialisation and inequality very clear to behold. The water from the public taps is an unknown risk, the food is made from untrustworthy sources, made by unreliable and uncaring hands, belonging to people who have been standing in the blistering heat all day, in a wind that blows hot, mixed with fumes of diesel and rot. The sunshine is a brownish yellow, and at night the stars are veiled. 

The main difference though is the disappearing countryside. Twenty years ago, the view from the iron-barred open train windows was of a rolling countryside - farmlands upon farmlands, a plethora of ponds, some with cattle floating merrily, the small towns flashed by quickly. Now the view from the tracks of the whole journey, from one major city, Delhi, population:22 million to another Ludhiana, population:1.6 million barely seems to touch upon green at all. The rail tracks border towns are expanding, infused with new boisterous economy, factories everywhere, large residential colonies for the new ‘aspirational classes’. The quiet farmers seem lost in all this, out of place. I had contemplated the urban emergence being akin to a monster, being fed by rail and highways, growing remarkably, with disturbing speed. It’s not long now, before the entire journey of 320km (200miles) would be through a continuous urban corridor.

This phenomena occurring throughout the ‘tiger’ economies of Asia is being referred to as the emergence of ‘The Great Asia Megacity’. In an article on ANZ’s Bluenotes on the ‘The Hyper Urbanisation of Asia’:

What if your urban hipster lifestyle was not in a city of 5 million people? Or even 10 million people? How would a hipster define "urban" in a mega-urban-agglomeration of nearly 3 billion people stretching nearly 12,000 kilometres from its northern to southern suburbs? Would you want to be right in the centre of that urban sprawl or would outer suburban fringe dwelling be more suited for you? 

Welcome to the future cities of Asia! Indeed, we may be misleading you already. A process of hyper-urbanisation is already underway across Asia. If that development continues at its current pace and depth it would inevitably lead to the entire urbanised population of Asia coalescing into one contiguous mega-urban-region that will hug the Pacific rim from Beijing in the North to Jakarta in the South. It will be the greatest city mankind has ever known. - The Hyper-Urbanisation of Asia Part 1: Asiaopolis

The above article series explores this phenomena from a economic opportunity point of view, but one can’t help but be dismayed about what this will mean in terms of planetary impact.  It has to be realised that this is not just a study in abstract, but the today and tomorrow of the very biosphere that surrounds us. The articles also discuss the following terms:

Megalopolis:  a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas which eventually fuse into one contiguous urban area (from article)

Eperapolis: a city that occupies a continent (from article)

Ecumenopolis:  a city made of the whole world

Now, where have I seen this before? Ah yes, in the world of Science-Fiction, in the very centre of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1942-) setting of a galaxy-wide human empire lies a capital city of Trantor. (The concept was also copied in Star Wars universe’s capital city-planet of Coruscant) This city, that defined the term Ecumenopolis, is actually a whole planet - borderless, continuous, without respite, all in metal, closed to the sky and closed to the ground. In the author’s own words .. 

“TRANTOR— . . . At the beginning of the thirteenth millennium, this tendency reached its climax. As the center of the Imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of generations and located, as it was, toward the central regions of the Galaxy among the most densely populated and industrially advanced worlds of the system, it could scarcely help being the densest and richest clot of humanity the Race had ever seen. 

Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of the task. (It is to be remembered that the impossibility of proper administration of the Galactic Empire under the uninspired leadership of the later Emperors was a considerable factor in the Fall.) Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor. . . .” 

Excerpt From: Isaac Asimov. “Foundation.”

We are not yet the centre of the galactic-empire. We haven’t even set foot beyond the moon. There is nowhere else to go, to source our dinner tables from, so what we do with this planet will echo back at our well being and quality of life. Right now the calculations of human governance do not factor in the environment, so things are out balance. From current standpoint the scales are going to tilt till some non-anthropocentric agency comes to righten things, when and which agency are questions to the future.

Following maps show the impact on the land corridor I referred to in the first few paragraphs. The data still does not take into account the last 5 years of further exponential growth. You can infer if the development is positive or otherwise.

Map from Earth Institute, Columbia University

On that train journey, we don’t buy open food from the stalls anymore, or drink from the public taps. The more affluent, we seal ourselves in air-conditioned train bogeys with sealed-windows , where the food is served from train-authorised on-board catering, with water out of hermetically sealed plastic bottles. There’s a note on the bottle, to remember to crush before disposing, just in case it is picked up and reused and re-sold in counterfeit. The less-affluent still use the regular resources, they can’t afford the high-priced guaranteed food. They are exposed to all the risks of less controlled products. The half-joke runs that their bodies have higher immunity. The joke on me is that after eating the ‘better-quality’ food I still got sick.

And you..

What about your travels - what and where have you seen change over time? The good changes, the not so good? Feel free to comment.

DIY nano-SIM to regular size SIM adapter

Stuck with a smaller-SIM card and have to switch to a phone which uses the larger (normal) version? 

Like a lot of people I recently put in an order for a new iPhone which are several weeks away from delivery, and in simultaneously managed to sell the existing older-generation iPhone. What to use in the meantime? I fished out an older Android phone from one of the storage drawers, but had an issue - it uses a ‘normal’ regular size SIM card. The size difference is shown below.

There were two options. First, to purchase a commercially available adapter as in image below.

Or second, perhaps much more fun and challenging - make my own. I took on the challenge, as I didn’t have the time to wait for a purchased version to come in.

The following ingredients were required:

1. Correct measurements template for each of the SIMs - 
• take a PDF printout from the helpful folks at nanosim-adapter.com 
2. A material of the same thickness as a SIM card to make the adaptor
• some thick card - example: discarded garment labels, or in my case, a sock pack cover.
3. Tools 
• scissors, basic sellotape, a little glue

Steps:

1. Take a printout of the earlier mentioned PDF sheet (A4 size). Make sure that in the print preferences, you do not scale down the document, or fit-to-page, or fit-to-margins.
2. Cut out the full SIM shape on the page, and 
   
3. Glue it to a suitable card material (For me it was a sock packet :) . Make sure to use very little, minimum glue. You don’t want it leaking into your phone. 
   
   
   
   
4. Cut the card to the regular SIM shape
   
5. Carefully cut out the hole for the nano-SIM, 
   
6. Make sure the actual nano-SIM card fits into the hole on the card.
   
7. Flip the card template and nano-SIM together over on the non-contacts side, and put sellotape across the back. 
   
8. Trim down any extra card or sellotape.
9. Your nano-SIM adapter is ready 
10. Put into your phone to test it out. 
    

If you got it right, it should work as it did for me (see below)! Cost = $0. 

Cellphone using SIM adaptor showing full reception

Note: The website mentioned also offers options of converting a regular-SIM to nano/micro-SIM, which is probably a DIY destructive process. Also to convert micro-SIM to regular-SIM, which is similar to steps above.

Kitesurfing on Petone Beach (Video)

There is always something happening on Petone Beach - sailboat classes, carnivals, fireworks, and on this gray and windy day - Kitesurfing.

Out for a walk with my son, we stopped for quite a while in the bone-chilling wind and observed the goings-on. I was able to take out my trusty mobile and capture the footage below.

Avoid getting repackaged as a social product

Both Facebook and Google+ are competing to use your inputs on their social platforms for endorsing their ads (see article). They provide you with a free service and then use you to sell stuff.

Fortunately, there are mechanisms to opt out, which for most will not be enabled by default.

To opt out of appearing in Google+ Ads

1. Go to https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements
2. Un-tick the checkbox that says "Based upon my activity, Google may show my name and profile photo in shared endorsements that appear in ads."
3. Click 'Save'

To opt out of appearing in Facebook Ads

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads
2. click the 'Edit' link for 'Ads and Friends'
3. under 'Pair my social actions with ads for', choose 'No one'
4. Click 'Save Changes'

Self portrait from outer space

NASA continues to send back astounding pictures from its explorer spacecraft.

On the same Earth day, July 19, 2013 two of these - Cassini-Huygens orbiting Saturn, and MESSENGER orbiting Mercury, captured these views of the Earth and Moon.

Two views of home (ID: PIA17038; NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute and NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

Here are close ups from the above image:

Saturn's view: 1.44 billion kilometers (898 million miles) away. "Earth appears as a blue dot at center right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side." - NASA

Mercury's view: 98 million kilometers (61 million miles) away. "Earth and the moon appear very large in this picture because they are overexposed. When looking for potentially dim satellites, long exposures are required to capture as much light as possible." - NASA

While Cassini's main mission is to study Saturn system, including its spectacular rings and moons, it has captured - "only the third time ever that our planet has been imaged from the outer solar system" (NASA). The Earth image was taken as part of a wider mosaic of images of the entire Saturn system. Looking back at Earth from Saturn can be difficult as the bright sun is in the same direction, but Cassini placed itself in the shadow of Saturn. From its position experiencing a solar eclipse and capturing the less bright objects around the area.

"This simulated view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the positions of Saturn and Earth on July 19, 2013" - NASA/JPL-Caltech

The deliberately inserted narrow-angle frame images in the sequence shot from Cassini shows a clearer separation of the Earth and the moon.

Narrow-angle frame image, with a 5 times magnification view (ID: PIA14949 & PIA17170, NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

In every story told and lived, our anthropocentric mind prefers to get involved when we are part of the story. For all the work that NASA and other space programs are doing, the most evocative tend to be these images, looking back at us from almost untouchable distances.

At a point like this we always come back to Carl Sagan's words:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

In his time he was referring to this earlier picture:

Taken by Voyager 1 in 1996, from a distance of more than 6.4 billion km (4 billion miles) from Earth. (NASA/JPL ID:PIA00452)

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More links:

• NASA Releases Images of Earth Taken by Distant Spacecraft
• NASA's Cassini-Huygens page
• Jet Propulsion Lab's Cassini-Huygens page
• Youtube - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
• Carl Sagan

You as a product

Revelations of the emergence of the 'surveillance state' in the US has deeply disturbed many who have been in denial about what massive accumulation of private individual data allows. Even though the private corporations may profess no nefarious intentions, the very fact that they have this data leads to temptations, targeting and inevitable opportunities of misuse. Facebook recently suffered a leak of 6 million private emails and phone numbers. These have surely been recorded by someone and will be used as targets for spammers, or as stolen shell identities to send out spam. The phones will get targeted with international spam calls offering cheap services and holidays. If the social graph (list of contacts) has been obtained then its even worse, as emails will go out to all friends of the stolen identity containing alarming, embarrassing, and unwanted messages.

Online ('cloud') service providers, such as Google, Apple etc. do not want you to be anonymous or even pseudonymous. They want to have the power of attorney over you complete true digital identities. At this year's WWDC, Apple was very happy to publicly declare that it has 575 million paying accounts, most of which have stored Credit Card details. YouTube has been constantly sending out requests to have users change their online public chosen names replaced with their true First - Last names.

A problem is that this identity especially when connected out to other services including ecommerce, becomes a massive target. IT Technology is not absolute - as long as information can be accessed by one person, then the mechanisms meant to keep another out will inevitably be overcome. Weaknesses will be technological as well as human. There are many existing and emerging programs of national surveillance and industrial espionage out there. If one is holding a guarded fort of valuable digital information, one should not wonder if it will be breached but when.

In the Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), the scene that keeps coming back to me most is when Morgan Freeman's character is mortified, when Batman asks him to use a new surveillance technology over their own company's mobile network to spy on the whole city simultaneously and locate the criminal targets. Freeman suitably calls it 'unethical ... too much power for one man' and agrees only after Batman agrees to destroy the machine at the end of mission. How likely do you think that such a tool, once constructed, would be dismantled in real life? 

The following is a very information packed diagram from Baynote, about where all the privacy data is coming from and going to, in some of the popular online presences.

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On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog ... till today

The Sun times a Billion

Our eyes and minds are not really designed to assimilate the scale of things that scientific observation reveals. Perhaps understandably, many still resist. Even the scientist deals with such things by abstracting the terms to a modicum of familiarity.

The following video wonderfully dispenses with the equations and numbers to give us a feel of the scale of the objects populating our night sky.

So when do India/China catch up?

I've had the opportunity to see Hans Rosling before in conferences, and one can't help but be infected by his sense of enthusiasm at the stories which his powerful interpretation of statistics reveal.

I guess his broadmindedness is partly explained by this stint in India as a student. I didn't know that before.

There is a new field or term emerging called data visualisation. The experts describe 'a sea of data' which is now available globally and accessible anywhere online. The problem is how to interpret it to reveal its hidden narrative. To find the simple story within the data/information overload. Rosling has been doing that since a long time before.

Thanks to the following presentation, 37 years from is now a milestone all of Asia would have its eye on. Striding along the stage with an "environmentally-friendly" presentation pointer, Rosling looks a bit like a modern day Gandhi, just carrying a bigger stick. He understands and sympathises with the emotional touch points of Indian audience and navigates them well. The prediction graphs and statistics are not going to progress on their own, we will have to live each day to that future date and contribute to the trajectory.

In case you don't want to see the whole video, Rosling answers the question at about 14 minutes from the start...

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Happy New Year 2011!

The first decade of the millenium - the 00's have passed. We are all a bit more 'digital', a bit more 'cyborg'. My new mobile phones now carry the internet along with me, there is now no escape from the information overload.

My little boy, now three, now recognizes and classifies his environment quite accurately. Soaking the world around him like an eager sponge. His toys are a bit different than mine were, he can control the TV and media remote without yet having learnt to read the words on the instructions.

Bridge to the Commonwealth Games 2010

FIFA 2010 Stadiums in Google Earth

Google have done an impressive job of 3D modelling the venues for the Football World Cup 2010 in their Google Earth application. Along with the stadiums, one can also get a good idea of the geography of the surrounding cities and scenery. The following video exhibits this:

Timelessness and Books

Walking through the local book fair, last weekend, I couldn't shake off the eerie feeling that in a few decades time this might be considered an antique market. EBooks (electronic books) are catching on in a lot of environments and are proving to be remarkably accessible and convenient. Already my eBook collection surpasses the physical one without affecting the number of boxes I store in the garage.

I also felt the quantity of people visiting the fair to be less than in previous years, perhaps that's why the organisers raised the prices of the items. I can't really imagine inflation to be a factor when dealing with old books.

My usual brief is to head straight for the Computers/Technical books section and pick up relevant copies of editions that are not obsoletely old, then head over to the science fiction area and see if anything catches my eye. After that it's a general stroll through the other sections.

In the fiction section I used to pick up a lot of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlam's quick read books, but finally time has caught up with them. The stories are based in, and dealing with, the Cold War - the plot tries to reach the reader by making him worry about the US-Russian nuclear standoff and the great spy games being played across the geopolitical chessboard. I used to really enjoy these tales, but the end of the Cold War was has cooled my enthusiasm. There were boxes and boxes of such paperback novels, lying untouched, unbrowsed. Time has passed these tales by and they, along with their authors, may be forgotten. Some, like the Robert Ludlam's Jason Bourne series have been adapted into movies with story-lines mutated into a more modern context, having little reference to the Cold War or the original story.

A generation ago, the same thing had happened to World War II tales, with comics like 'Commando', and during/post-war Nazi conspiracy fiction.

The quick rate of environmental change is reducing the shelf-life of cultural expressions even further. Is there anything that would make a book truly timeless?

Shown below is my part of the haul this time. We took a half-empty box of only select books to the pricing counter, where they pointed out that a whole box is equal to a half box in price. We promptly went back for another round and managed to stuff a large box with extra books that were previously secondary considerations. This time, the heavy box shook the pricing counter.

Online Screening

My law firm, sends out a useful information newsletter every few weeks. This time they have covered the topic of employee screening. There are some important tidbits worthy of note:

Recent media reports have shown an increase in cases of employee fraud. This may be due to the greater financial difficulties people are facing during the recession. ...

One important way to reduce the risk of fraud by employees is through the pre-employment screening process. ...

Some employees are even screening prospective employees by “googling” them or looking into their Facebook or other social networking sites. Often these can provide an insight into an employee that they may be reluctant to reveal at an interview.

Here's a law firm confirming it - your online profile matters more than you think, and with sites such as Facebook disrespecting their users' privacy and opening up their details to the public web, it pays to be mindful of what you put up online. The web is a reflection of the real world, and not an escape from it.

Related post:

• Book: Future of Reputations

Facebook beats Google in U.S.

Unimaginable that any website would be a more visited online destination than the ubiquitous Google. However, in U.S. where the online revolution began, it seems that the social website Facebook, which also contains its own application platform, now attracts more internet traffic than Google.



The rise of Facebook according to the graph, has been spectacular. I've noticed that friends which until recently I found only on other platforms such as Orkut (popular in India) and Yahoo are now to be found in Facebook.

Facebook was launched just in 2004, for just Harvard students, then expanded outwards in later-2006 to anyone holding a valid email address. At that time myspace.com was the leader site in online personal web pages, and the two became rivals. Myspace allowed its users to design their pages in any way they liked, while Facebook kept control on the look and feel. This ended up making myspace a very wild and noisy online space filled with the participants' creativity, but confusing for the casual user. Facebook reduced your design choices, but that made it simpler and recognisable. Myspace has reduced in profile, but still popular among musicians and artists. Now, Facebook has moved far beyond myspace and seems to be competing with status-update micro-blogging site Twitter.

In 2007, Facebook launched a platform, f8 for creating applications that ran on its website. There was also an associated Facebook Markup Language. This allowed developers to create their own games and experiences that user could share with each other on the website. The experience moved beyond simple communication between community members to participating in shared activity. This can be very addictive especially where elements of competition and public achievement are introduced into the application, such as in multi-player games. This is especially helping to keep people locked into the Facebook website.

While Facebook has no hope of beating Google as a way of searching on the web, the shift in traffic share, does mark a change in the way people are now using the Internet - to participate in communication and shared experiences rather than a convenient source of information.

Jugaad, getting serious now

A term that has always been more a slang than even a formal Hindi word, has suddenly acquired respectibility in the Management world. India's economic profile rising, and it is only proper that practices that seem to work in this nation are formally propounded, expounded and then propagated as the new gospel. Witness Japan's 'Kaizen' business process philosophy export.

I remember jugaad was a quick word that school and college friends would exchange to refer to a 'thing-a-ma-jig' quickly put together to do what we wanted to do.

Now a blog in the eminent Harvard Business Review defines it in the following terms:

... the gutsy art of Jugaad. The Hindi term roughly translates as "overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an effective solution using limited resources". We call it the art of creative improvisation — within a framework of deep knowledge and experience.

Through our research, we have identified four operating principles or innovation rules:

• Thrift not waste. This first rule — which promotes frugality — helps tackle scarcity of all forms of resources.
• Inclusion, not exclusion. This second rule helps entrepreneurial organizations to put inclusiveness into practice — by tightly connecting with, and harnessing, the growing diversity that permeates their communities of customers, employees, and partners.
• Bottom-up participation, not top-down command and control. This third rule drives collaboration. CEOs who tend to act as conductors must learn to facilitate collaborative improvisation just as players in jazz bands do.
• Flexible thinking and action, not linear planning. This fourth rule facilitates flexibility in thinking and action. Jugaad-practicing firms are highly adaptable as they aren't wedded to any single business model and pursue multiple options at any time.

- Jugaad: A New Growth Formula for Corporate America

Management has always sought to capture the Innovation genie in its bottle of standard methodologies. In a field which focuses more on the way you work, rather than what you are working on, the accepted concepts are as liable to change, as clothes in a fashion show. However, there's just something about Jugaad that makes it incongruous to a formal management definition.

The term has become well known in the wider world with the publication of From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation. The book addresses the right question of

Why is it that India is unable to be the source of major industrial innovations on a sustained basis even though it has highly skilled talent and a penchant for jugaad (creative improvisation)?

- From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation, The Challenge for India, by Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Professor of Corporate Strategy, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India

Jugaad is a starting point that happens in under-resourced conditions, but to scale the initial innovation requires other ways and means. I thought the following words expressed it well:

Jugaad is a survival tactic, whereas a hack is an intellectual art form; i.e. Jugaad is the wile of the poor, and hack the pastime of the affluent cerebral. Jugaad is a hack to get around or deal with a lack of or limited resources, and has a class component to it - jugaad are things poor but clever people do to make the most of the resources they have. They do what they need to do, without regard to what is supposed to be possible.

- Jugaad vs. Hack - Wikipedia

Examples

The 'Jugaad' (or Maruta) in Punjab region is also used to refer to a 'poor'-man's assembled vehicle, made by putting together a cheap low-powered water pump with a custom body.

Image courtesy Wikimedia

Now one wouldn't call this a great engineering success, but it is heroic in the attempt by rural-poor to cobble together a ride.

Washing machine ad



More examples of Jugaad can be found at Espirit de Jugaad, Hindustan Times.

Explore further

• Wall Street Journal Review
• Indique Documentaries

News Channel Secrets

I don't watch as much news on TV anymore. Is it that the internet has taken over, or perhaps I've become subconsciously aware of the same boring pattern. See video below: