SAST Wingees

Askhar Dham – A 300 million person hour magnum opus

Last week, i had gone to New Delhi on business. I had some time on my hands and i decided to stop by my cousin’s place. We chatted for a while and he asked if i had seen Akshar Dham? I vaguely remembered having heard of it. My cousin told me that i had to see it. So we drove to Akshar Dham and we had about an hour and a half to spend.

As soon as we pulled in, i was awe struck by the splendor of the 100 acre complex. Photos don’t do justice to this place. Nevertheless, a sample photo from the Akshardham website is below.

We first stopped at the visitor center to learn more about the place. Learnt some impressive statistics – 11,000 artisans spent 300 million person hours over a 5 year period to build this. The whole monument has been built without steel using rajasthani pink stone and marble entirely. I am told that this is because they want this monument to last 1000 years! It has 300,000 carved stones, 9 magnificent domes, 20,000 carved figures.

After that we stepped into the Garden of India as they call it. Bronze statues of India’s great leaders, philosophers etc adorn this area.

Then we went into the main monument which houses Bhagwan Swaminarayan’s idol. It is a 141 ft tall building. Every inch (not exaggerating) is carved with intricate scultptures and art work. One can see such intricate work only temples that are more than 1000 years old (say the Big Temple of Tanjore). Inside the monument there is lot of carvings. The inside ceilings of the domes are magnificently carved as well. There is a series of pictures explaining Bhagwan Swaminarayan’s life – a very impressive and inspiring story. For those that don’t know, he founded the Swaminarayan Sect of Hinduism whose members have built this monument.

The base of the main shrine is adorned with 148 stone elephant sculptures called the Gajendra Peeth . The sculptures cover many stories involving elephants from Hindu mythology – very impressive like everything else here. The plinth is 1070 ft long and it weighed 3000 tons. It took almost 4 years to do just this plinth.

I couldn’t see all of the place in the short time that we were there. One question that arose in my mind is – what are key beliefs of the swaminarayan sect compared to regular hinduism?

They belong to the visishtadvaita (conditional non-dualism philosophy) school of thought. They always worship both the male god and the female goddess together. They are also staunch vegetarians.

On the whole, i was overwhelmed by this visit. The thing that blew my mind away is the scale and grandeur of this monument. My personal view is that we don’t really “get” scale in India as much as the westerners or the chinese and this monument has put a dent on my views. I wish more people in India thought about “scale” in whatever it is that we do.

I do plan to go there again to do a more elaborate tour. If you are visiting New Delhi, don’t miss this amazing monument. Don’t worry if you are not a Hindu. The monument has no restrictions based upon one’s religion. It may be hard to understand some of the sculptures without knowing Hindu mythology. You can take one of your knowledgeable Hindu friends to help with that.

If you want to be a great conversationalist, don’t talk!

Updated Sep 30, 2007: Dr. Frank makes a very interesting comment below about listening. He has a very interesting take on communication on his blog – communication is a dance which is a must read.

Okay, by now it must be clear to you all that I love this type of stuff. Stay with me. One of the first non-fiction books I read was “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie. It is the type of book that fires up your imagination and opens up new vistas in your mind. It is a true self-help classic.

I still remember many examples from this book and that’s a big accomplishment for a book I read almost 20 years ago. Of all the things I read in the book, one incident he talked about has remained etched in my memory – Dale Carnegie spends 1 hour with someone and during that time he speaks only for 5 min and the rest of the time was spent listening to the other person. In the end the other person tells Dale that he is a great conversationalist.

If ever you wanted a great example of listening skills , this is the one. Because of how counter intuitive this is – you talk less and listen more and you are a better conversationalist – this lesson never leaves my mind. I have applied this lesson many times and I found that not only do I become a better conversationalist but I also tend to learn more. Recently, I met an entrepreneur for 1.5 hours. She wanted some advice on Knowledge Management and a mutual friend had arranged the meeting.

In the 1.5 hours, I spoke at best for maybe 10-12 minutes at the maximum. She was explaining about how she started and how she grew the company rapidly in a short time etc. I found her story really fascinating and inspiring as well. I finshed the meeting and came home. A few days later I heard from the mutual friend that the entrepreneur was very impressed with my knowledge and she found the session very helpful!

I experienced the Dale Carnegie Aha moment yet again and I thought I’ll share it with you. The reason behind this is (I think), most people want to talk and but are seldom listened to. In sum, if you want to be a great conversationalist, listening serves you better.

What are your experiences in this area? Do you agree?

Green card gridlock – Half a million highly skilled people in the USA are stuck – please help

Updated Sep 24, 2007: Vamsi has posted some interesting observations on his blog after attending the rally. Check it out.

Updated Sep 17, 2007: This post has been Desipundited. Thanks a lot Ash.

I am writing this at the behest of Vamsi Poondla, a colleague, who is the Florida state leader in the Immigration Voice organization. If you are in the USA and you don’t have a Green Card yet, you may want to pay attention and take action.

Immigration Voice is a not-for-profit organization that has been founded to urge Congress to change immigration laws that have become antiquated.

Washington Post profiled Aman Kapoor, the founder of Immigration Voice. The story is inspiring to read, even if this issue doesn’t matter to you.

Immigration Voice volunteers used an innovative campaign based on Gandhigiri techniques. They sent lots of roses to immigration officials in protest. The complete archive of this innovative campaign which received lots of press coverage is here.

The two core issues that they want the law makers to address are (from the immigration voice website):

1. Green Card Delays and Backlogs :

The Employment based green card system is completely broken due to excessive delays and backlogs in petitions of nearly half a million highly skilled workers who are certified by US Government to be doing a job that no US citizen is willing, qualified or able to do. The delays in obtained permanent residency are due to 2 reasons: Numerical caps on employment-based green cards and processing delays in adjudication of files. Today the system takes anywhere between 6-12 years to grant Green cards to some of the best and brightest of the world who have chosen America as their future home.

These future Americans are facing huge quality of life issues and their employers are facing difficulty in attracting more of the best and brightest of the world due to the broken system. The system prevents these workers from accepting promotions and switching jobs for the time-period it takes to process their files. By stagnating career growth and suffocating the creativity of the most innovative and technical minds of the world, America is creating a class of future Americans, who would see no career growth for 6-12 years and making under-achievers of these individuals.

The pressure on these individuals to go back to their home countries are increasingly each day as many world economies, especially India and China are booming and they also happen to be the country of origin of more than half of these skilled foreign-born workforce. If America delays reform of the broken system of employment based immigration, the pressure on these individuals to go back would neutralize the incentive to wait here and tough it out with the broken system. It would result in a reverse brain drain where the talent and human capital flows from developed west to the burgeoning Asian economies. The reverse brain drain would exacerbate the effects of overseas outsourcing on economy. These future Americans have waited for reform for more than 2 years but congress hasn’t reformed the system yet. The fight for the best and brightest in the world is America’s to lose.

2. The Per-Country rationing of green cards that exacerbates the delays :

Today, the employment based skilled immigrants face more backlogs if they are from India, China, Mexico or Philippines than what backlogs they would face if they were born anywhere but these 4 countries. This is due to the fact that green cards from the annual quota are rationed at 7% per country. Unused visas from the remaining countries that don’t use the 7% allocated visas are mostly never allotted to these 4 countries that have the highest number of scientists, engineers and technology workers willing to make America their future home. It is discriminatory to have laws that subject immigrants from 4 nations to more backlogs and the resulting hardship from such backlogs.

America has had per-country ceilings since decades on family based and diversity-lottery based visas and it makes sense to have uniform distribution of visas to countries where the basis for immigration is family relationship and family reunification. However, in the employment based immigration system, the petitioner is the employer who wants the retain the employee and facilitate employee retention based on skills, knowledge, education and talent. Employability has nothing to do country of birth. We do not allow employers to discriminate hiring based on their nationality or country of origin. Therefore, the employment-based immigration, which is a derivative benefit of employment, should also be free from rationing based on nationality or country of birth.

How can you contribute? You can make donations or you can volunteer. As Vamsi has shown, you can get involved directly like him. You can also write blog posts and do other things to raise visibility for the cause.

The organization is planning a protest rally on Sep 18th in Washington DC. If you are in that area, you can participate in the rally.

I am happy to see people taking action on key issues like this instead of suffering silently. Hopefully the US Congress will wake up and fix the issue.

Further reading:

1. Times of India covering the Green Card Gridlock I copied my subject line from here.

The breakthrough that powered India’s White Revolution

I recently came across an article in the Times of India newspaper featuring Verghese Kurien, the father of India’s white revolution.

He says in that article:

When noted dairyman and director of dairy research in New Zealand Professor William Riddet visited Anand, he told me that he was happy to know that I had made a significant name in the dairy industry at such a young age. Then he asked me: “But, why are you such a bloody fool? Why are you working on a project that is bound to fail?” I told him that I would make it. He asked me if there was anything on earth that could dissuade me from embarking on a project that was bound to fail and I replied “nothing.”

I started wondering about why converting Buffalo Milk into powder is so important. It turns out that India has amongst the world’s largest populations of Buffalos – we have close to 50% of the total population of buffalos.

By extension, we also produce a lot of buffalo milk whereas most other countries mainly produce cow’s milk. During the lean months, when milk supply is not high, it is common practice to mix in milk reconstituted from milk powder to supplement the supply. Because, we could not convert Buffalo Milk into powder, we faced a serious issue of over supply in peak months and under supply in lean months. If the White Revolution had to take off, we absolutely needed to figure out a way to convert Buffalo Milk into powder.

This is what drove Verghese Kurien and H.M. Dalaya to figure out a way to do the impossible. Here is an article that was written when Dalaya passed away in the Hindu Business Line.

IF there is one technological breakthrough that truly revolutionised India’s organised dairy industry, it is the making of milk powder out of buffalo milk. And the man who made this possible defying prevailing technical wisdom — Mr H.M. Dalaya — passed away in Pune on Sunday, aged 83.

It is not clear why the scientists thought that buffalo milk could not be converted into milk powder. After reading several articles, it appears it is due to the fact that Buffalo Milk has amongst the highest fat content. Perhaps, the high fat content somehow interferes with the spray drying process used for producing milk powder.

If there is some dairy expert out there, please let us know the real reason.

The White Revolution or Operation Flood has been so successful that India was transformed into the world’s largest milk producer in 1997 and has retained its leadership since – one of the few areas in which we are ahead of China.

We have to thank Amul for playing the key role in this epochal accomplishment under the leadership of Dr. Verghese Kurien.

By their pioneering efforts, Kurien and Dalaya proved an old Arabic proverb – “the difficult is done at once; the impossible takes a little longer.”

OrgChart Wiki experiment by Forbes.com

Recently came across an interesting experiment being done by Forbes magazine with their orgchart wiki project. They are expecting the wider Internet community to update the org charts of the public companies. They already have uploaded the information about boards of directors for all public companies. They feature key companies like Apple and Google and Intel on the home page of the project.

One feature i thought they could easily add is links to articles they have written on the people featured in these org charts. For instance, i should be able to click on Steve Jobs and look at all the articles Forbes has written about him or featuring him.

Seems like an interesting use of Wiki (they actually use an Adobe Flash based UI instead of Ajax). What do you all think?