Why all the hoopla about ‘jugaad’?

I see trend coming up and I don’t think it’s a trend at all — I’m talking about ‘jugaad’ here. I think it started off with this post by Sarah Lucy of TechCruch (she’s been writing a lot about startup scene in India = awesomeness) and now I see a story at Business Week on the same lines. My question… why the sudden hoopla about jugaad?

The basic funda behind  jugaad is to get the work done ASAP with minimal investments but aren’t there lot of people doing that already? The only thing new for someone from the west is the word and not the concept. Don’t believe me? Check out ‘There I’ve Fixed it‘ people have been doing all over the world through the years. It’s no different from one of the home made remedies my mom would come up with if an insect bit me. Jugaad is about meeting the demand without wasting much time.Real time blogging is jugaad. You add more info as and when it comes.

Jugaad is about satisfying the basic need, no added features, just one solid feature. It’s also about an idea, one brilliant idea which, if developed well could become something much bigger over time. To an extant Twitter two years back was jugaad. It just had one feature update your status message. No @replies, no lists, no organic RTs no nothing. It just catered to people who wanted to keep people posted about their whereabouts.

Jugaad is about desperation. I’m late for work and my vehicle just broke down. Autorickshaw refuses to go and what do I do? I hitch a ride. If you think of it, running a website via cloud is also jugaad. Going for shared hosting instead of a full server is jugaad. Using wordpress to design a website instead of developing a CMS+front is jugaad.

So why west… why go over over the top with jugaad? At best your efforts might help land the word in oxford dictionary, if it hasn’t already and may be a place in management books of the future. Apart from that the term doesn’t deserve more attention.

26/11 I Will Never Forget the Day

For a small group of people they were ‘heroes’, for us they were terrorists. Their heroes killed our heroes.

A few new heroes emerged.

Some heroes from the bigscreen became zeros overnight.

The same set of words, pictures and videos were used by media in as many combinations as they could have. But why?

The real criminal — a failed political, and intelligence system — went scot-free, after making a dozen promises.

Tears gave way to anger, to frustration, more frustration and to tears again.

The Earth has come a full cycle, so have we. But we will never forget will we? We shouldn’t, because nothing has changed.

#2611neverforget

Please get these people on Sach Ka Samna

I watched one or two episodes of Sach Ka Samna and I found it to be as good as the original (Moment of Truth) in terms of production and equally controversial with the questions. They have only invited celebrities till now in the show, but I have a few recommendations. Here goes:

Politician

(Nothing like a populist and corrupt politician to bring up the TRPs)

Q: Sirjee do you have black money or not

A: Bilkul nahi (Absolutely not)

Machine: Ye jawab galat hai (wrong answer)

Bangalore Auto Driver

(Been a while since I cribbed about auto guys. But there was this recent incident which I have to blog about. Will post it tomorrow)

Q: Do you take double of metre charge even in broad day light

A: Eh ya (Some of them are shameless you see)

Machine: Ye jawab sahi hai (answer’s right)

Host: Congratulations for winning 1,00,000 but shame on you for charging double rate.

@Ev

(Founder of Twitter)

Q: Do you think you will ever make money from Twitter

A: Can I tweet about this?

Host: No!

A: Okay then yes

Machine: Ye jawab galat hai (wrong answer)

Now get spammed on the move – SPDC 2009

I am cool with spamming, in the sense, I find it very entertaining; amusing rather. Just the thought of someone trying to sell ‘v1agra’ to a guy in 20s who still hasn’t bothered to get a credit card is hilarious to say the least. The most interesting of the lot, are those guys who want to send you hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds to evade tax. Ya right. If you are so desperate to get rid of funds temporarily, why not just send me a cheque rather than an email? Oh sorry, forgot you’re a con-artist. My bad.

I think these con-artists are facing the threat of extinction, thanks to advances in spam filters of email providers like Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. But hey, guess what — these guys are smart. They figured that there are more mobile users in India than internet users. So now they have started sending out such message via SMS. Unbelievable? Believable, because I got one of these messages. It goes like this.

CONGRAT! YOUR MOBILE NO HAS WON 450,000 POUNDS IN 2009 SPDC INTL MOBILE DRAW, TO CLAIM CONTACT EDWIN MORGAN ON +447014225488 EMAIL SPDCENGLAND@HOTMAIL.COM

Awesome no? By the way the message was in all caps I kept them like that to retain the originality. Internet users are always skeptical of such mails and have learned to ignore them, but mobile users, well there will be a lot of users who are naive and fall for this and hey, SMSs don’t even go to any spam folder! So in case you get such an SMS don’t get over excited  and jump into the fray, instead pause for a moment and appreciate the humour. You can optionally reply with a “Thanks but no thanks”. Any other suggestions?

Talking of spam I suggest you read this comic FlyYouFools and it looks like I am not the only one to get this SMS and yes, this proves my point about mobile users being naive to such scams. The funny part is that people don’t even stop to wonder what the hell SPDC is, or how they got your number, or why they would have a ‘hotmail’ account as email id.

Please do spread the word.

UPDATE: According to Thejesh, if you call back probably you will get charged heavily…airtel had warned few months back.

How i.in led to chupchap.in

I had promised here to narrate the long story behind this domain I bought and how I set it up. It all started with me being confused about what kind of domain I wanted to buy. Should it be chupchap.com, chupchap.in a shorter domain like chup.in or something even shorter. I just wasn’t sure; just indecisive. Yet another problem with young people these days I suppose.

So what do most people do when they want a domain? Head to who.is to check if the domain they want is available and that’s what I did. I searched chupchap.com and chupchap.in, and to my pleasure, found that both of them were available. So what now? Should I go ahead and register them or waste more time searching for shorter, but not necessarily better domain? I decided to waste some more time.

So I thought if I wanted a magical domain name what would it be? The first domain name that came to my head was i.in. After all this blog is all about me; I hardly write about anyone else no?

So I searched and to my surprise (very very surprised) I found that it was still available. Oh My God, the shortest domain possible, a premium one and it’s available! So I headed straight to eWebguru, where my gaming blog is hosted. I booked it in three easy steps at around Rs1,600, which is a standard rate at the host.

I was rejoiced, after all I have a premium domain, I could start a impossible-to-make-profit-off URL shortening service, an email service or sell it off at a higher price. I was overjoyed. So overjoyed that I decided to share it with my followers at twitter. After a round of congratulatory tweets, someone pointed it out to me. It is impossible for me to own such a domain. Turns out, all one-character and two-character domains, are reserved by government and NIXI order, and are not available to the public. For example I could buy abc.in but not a.in or ab.in

I was heart broken. After filing for a support ticket, which was answered in fifteen minutes, I was given an option to opt for any other .in domain. This time, I did not try to experiment. I opted for chupchap.in and by next day my domain was active. But every day when I visit my blog (to find that 25 people landed up on my blog and they came via image search aaargh!)I wish it was i.in and imagine having a four/five/six figure bank dollars (in dollars I mean).

If you are interested in setting up your blog/website, you can try out eWebguru where my blog is hosted. You will get a good deal if you follow this link. This link is part of their referral program which I have signed up for, but this post is in no way sponsored by them.

This has to be the best election ever!

Congress is set to form a government, and Prakash Karat feels ‘left out’.

CPI is happy that BJP/NDA did not win the election.

BJP, at least in Kerala, are happy that CPI has been sidelined.

Congress is happy that both these parties are not in their way.

Twitter users are happy that #indiavotes09 was a “trending topic” on twitter for around 8 hours.

News channels are happy because they got something to blabber about for days together.

Mathematicians, numerologists, astrologists, historians, professors and political experts are happy because, news channels will call them up on an hourly basis for “expert opinion”.

Voters, in general are happy because… hmm are they happy? Well let’s ask them at the end of 5 years. Let’s forget that we elected politicians to power and the fact that they are supposed to fulfill all the promises they made during the election. See you after 5 years Indian voter, let’s go into a slumber. Sleep well.