Tambola In The Newspaper… Brilliant!

The newspaper industry is booming in India as reported here, especially financial newspapers since the Indian economy is growing 8% and the average investor wants to stay informed. But that hasn’t stopped newspapers from getting creative.

This is obviously old news, but I recently found out about it since my parents moved to Bangalore. Move over Crosswords, Sudoku, Chess and Bridge problems. My father gets his daily copy of Times of India (TOI) delivered with a Tambola ticket. For this who don’t know what Tambola is, it is a game similar to Bingo.

Here’s how TOI describes the game – “A game with prizes and celebrities mixed together. Just grab today’s Times of India.” So every copy of TOI ships with a Tambola ticket. A series of numbers are released each day, and winners are selected within a week. These first round winners have to appear in person to play another round of Tambola at a gathering hosted by local celebrities. There are prizes for everyone and the whole event is sponsored by corporate firms.

World’s Most Visited Building

File this in the “Did You Know?” category, or rather “hmm… I never knew that” category. I stumbled upon “1000 places to see before you die” on Discovery Channel this weekend. They were featuring North India.

Apparently, the Bahai Temple in New Delhi is the most visited building in the world. On an average, 10,000 visit the “lotus” temple everyday.

The photo is from my visit to the Lotus temple back in 1997. More on the Bahai House of worship here and the New Delhi Bahai temple architecture here.

Another Indian architecture trivia from the same program – the Qutub Minar is the highest brick minaret in the world. This from the Wikipedia entry – the Qutub Minar is 72.5 metres high (237.8 ft) and requires 399 steps to get to the top. I went to school in New Delhi for 3 years and my school bus used to drive by the Qutub Minar everday.

The tall iron structure next to it has an history of its own. This from the Wikipedia entry – made up of 98% wrought iron of pure quality, it is 7.21m (23 feet 8 inches) high, with 93cm buried below the present floor level, and has a diameter of 41cm (16 inches) at the bottom which tapers down on going up. The pillar was manufactured by forge welding and the temperatures required to form such of pillar by forge welding can be achieved by combustion of coal. The pillar is a testament to the high level of skill achieved by ancient Indian iron smiths in the extraction and processing of iron.

What Can Orkut Do For Your Love Life?

When I was India in January 2007, my friend Akshay Chikodi asked me if was on Orkut. Frankly, he said, if you’re not on Orkut you don’t exist! So I created a profile on Orkut.

Couple things I don’t get about Orkut:

• What is it trying to be – a social networking tool? dating site? First thing you create a profile, you see this message - Next steps: Are you single? Tell everyone what you are looking for to get orkut working for you!
• It looks like a developer’s prototype when compared to Facebook.

But obviously, it is definitely doing a few things right. Read Gautam’s post here, Alexa ranks Orkut second in India followed by Yahoo. Orkut on last count had over 57.4M users, 15% = 8.6M Indians on Orkut. Even though it seems a bit on the higher side, it nevertheless is a great tool for people search. People search online is catching on and I don’t think there exists a better database of Indians in India and abroad – profiles with real names, pictures, bios & interests, life/event updates and a listing of every other friend on Orkut.

Some Orkut demographics from here:

• Over 15% of Orkut profiles are Indians (Brazil on top with 55%, followed by US with 19% users).

• 70% users are between ages 18-30.

• less than 20% are either married or committed (42% no answer, 36% single)

• 65% are on Orkut for friends, 18% for dating

The last bit of info is very interesting. Given that a majority of users are between ages 18-30 and single, is Orkut big enough to challenge the hugely successful martrimonial and dating websites? Same for Facebook, can it be the end of Match.com and the likes? Why pay a premium for meeting other singles if you can “poke” or “send teasers” for no charge? Or is that too creepy for some users?

Orkut’s help section on “What can Orkut do for your love life?” here. If you’re on Orkut, I’d love to hear from you.

Majority of NYC sewer manhole covers “Made in India”

For all those proud New Yorkers that claim to know every bit about the city history, I can almost guarantee a good bar conversation. Here’s how it usually goes:

Q: How many years have you lived in the city?

A: Over 5 years

Q: How many miles do you walk each day?

A: About a mile or two

Q: Did you know a majority of NYC sewer manhole covers are imported from India?

A: No way! You’ve gotta be kidding me! Did this just happen?

Most of New York City’s 600,000 manhole covers and the many hundreds of thousands all over the US come from India. And foundries in and around Kolkata claim a big chunk of that business. Indian companies began supplying manhole and sewer access covers to the US almost four decades ago. But in recent times their business has gone up manifold as they charge only a third of what US makers demand for the same work.

Read more here and here.

Imagine India: Macy’s brings Lord Ganesha to SFO

Walking around Union Square in San Francisco, I was surprised to see a huge Lord Ganesha sitting on top of the Macy’s sign. Apparently, the SFO Union Square Macy’s has a flower show every year. The theme for their 61st annual Flower show was “Imagine India”.

They got it mostly right – 20 feet Ganesha in front, windows decorated, lots of silk and Indian cotton apparels in the store, and of course the Indian tricolor fluttering on top of the store. You wonder what’s the business incentive – it wasn’t additional foot traffic. Cultural capital, maybe?

India Unleashed 2007

Notes from the The South Asian Business Association (SABA) conference at Columbia University:

India shining:

• 50% of India’s population is under 30 years old
• India #1 in milk production and #2 in fruit & veg production
• Hindalco – World’s #1 Aluminium producer
• Mittal – World’s #1 Steel producer
• Reliance invests 22M in Chevron, Dow Chemicals and few other US based companies

Challenges facing India:

• Bringing 600M non-urban population into the mainstream
• Building infrastructure – 350B dollars invested
• Power Crisis – the culture of “free power” has to go
• Water shortage
• 50% illiteracy in Bihar & UP
• 5.7M HIV infected (projected: 50M deaths/year by 2050)
• Education & Health – address social infrastructure problems
• Agricultural productivity and inefficient supply chain – new retail chains like Reliance Fresh & Bharati-Walmart should help eliminate inefficiencies in raw produce procurement from farmers
• Nuclear threat and inflammation a huge threat (India’s nuclear weapons capability annual expenses = 0.5% of GDP – Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian)

Arun Shourie, former Disinvestment Minister and former editor of Indian Express, emphasized that every Indian is a reflection of India; non-Indians look at us and develop an impression of India and Indians. On a lighter note (joked Shashi Tharoor), don’t be alarmed if an American walks up to you with a broken laptop at the airport.

• Economy steadily growing 9% YOY
• Exports growing 23% every year
• Forex Reserves touch 200B
• Remittances into India 24M/year
• 6M new mobile subscribers/month

But then…

• 98% of parliamentarians voted on minority vote
• 60% voted into parliament by less than 40% voter turnout

Shourie’s Quote of the Day: While India is not the land of snake charmers anymore, we also can charm snakes.

Shashi Tharoor stressed upon the significance of nation’s “soft power” – the ability to influence or persuade other nations without military power. Soft power could be derived from spreading culture and awareness (Bollywood and tourism), political values (biggest democracy and secular governing body) and foreign policy (credibility).

Move over “melting pots” and “salad bowl”, the thali is here.  Tharoor used the thali as an analogy for Indian diversity – assorted platter, yet each its own.