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My name’s Peter and I’m a…

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Alcohol is quite a contentious issue in India for a number of social, political and religious reasons. Some states go as far as outright banning it, others, like Goa, take a more laid back approach. Both policies bring their own set of problems. Mumbai has taken the decision to force anyone who wants to go to a bar to get a permit from the police which has to be shown each time you buy a drink.

Chennai, a deeply conservative city, has had a love-hate relationship with the stuff. Successive governments first restrict the licensing laws to much fanfare before quietly relaxing them later on.

Today, after firstly restricting the sale of alcohol in the state, the ruling party allowed the licensing hours to be extended to 12 midnight for some places and completely relaxed to 24 hours for 5 star hotels in the city, giving customers to opportunity to get a drink any time they feel like it.

Now, I’m not sure whether to feel a great sense of pride or rapidly go and check myself in to the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous group because this afternoon I get phone calls from two different hotels inviting me to come and enjoy extended drinking hours at their respective bars!

Sums Up Politicians Quite Nicely

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A driver was stuck in a traffic jam on the M25.

Nothing was moving.

Suddenly, a man knocks on the window.

The driver rolls down the window and asks, “What’s going on?”

“Terrorists have kidnapped all of our MP’s during a sitting of parliament and they’re demanding a £100 million ransom otherwise they are going to douse them all in petrol and set them on fire. We are going from car to car urgently collecting donations.”

“How much is everyone giving, on average?” the driver asks.

The man scratches his chin in quick contemplation and replies, “Roughly a gallon.”

Democracy For Sale

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When it comes to interviewing for jobs in India you never really know what you’re going to get (which is probably the same the world over but I’ve never interviewed anyone in England so am in no position to say!). Often candidates haven’t been taught how to handle an interview, say the wrong thing, don’t say enough, say too much, don’t let the interviewer speak, cut the interviewer off in the middle of a question or worse they have read a “how to ace your interview” guide on ehow.com and come up with answers like “my biggest weakness is that I’m a workaholic.”

My company is currently doing interview rounds as we look to expand our team and as usual the process has thrown up a number of anecdotes. My favourite one so far went like this…

A young man enters the office. He’s from a small village in rural Tamil Nadu and visibly apprehensive, nervous and uncomfortable in the surroundings. His answers are short and he’s got no conviction in what he says. Determined to bring the young man out of his shell the interviewer tries a number of light conversation topics like films, food and family until she hits on one topic where his face lights up light a 1000 watt bulb. “actually it’s my life’s dream to be an MP for my village” he tells her, then continuing, “I will bring development and jobs, make electricity come and make sure everyone has healthcare. Then I will campaign for Tamil rights in Sri Lanka and bring the Sri Lankan government to justice.”

Suitably impressed with the eloquence and passion with which the young man has described his ambitions the interviewer asks him how he plans to get elected. The young man brushed the question aside and said “I will join whichever party gives me the most money then I will pay everyone in my village to vote for me.”

And that is south Indian politics :-)

Technology Fail

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It’s strange how we don’t notice technology until it fails us. In India we have to put up with daily power cuts that can last up to two hours and sometimes even the whole day. Even though we know the cuts are coming it still seems to catch us off guard by coming at a really inconvenient time.

Today I had the option of leaving the office fairly early, I just had to get some paperwork printed and photocopied. Of course, technology failed me as the office bought a new super whiz printer with wifi but the computer stubbonly refused to talk to the printer regardless of whether it was connected by USB, ethernet or wifi. I exhausted my entire arsenal of ninja Google search skills looking for a solution but all in vain. The printer was a Canon by the way, just incase you were thinking of buying one. In the end the computer gave up and said “you know what, good luck on that one because there ain’t no printer around here”.*

Then this evening I was supposed to be involved with a pretty exciting call to a PR company in America. The way it works is you fund your Skype account with some money and you can call a number in the US to be patched in to the confernce. The moment I funded my account the Internet died on me so I couldn’t connect. I knew it was fairly important so I called in from my pre-paid Indian number (calling to a US number, youch!) which lasted all of 5 minutes before it burned through all the credit.

10 minutes later my Internet came back so I quickly connected to the conference again via Skype but that lasted barely 3 minutes before the Internet conked out again. I’ve had Internet installed for 8 months and it has never gone down, the one time I really need it and it fails me.

Today was just one big fat technology fail.

* Actually the printer didn’t say that exactly, I was just giving it a bit of anthropomorphic personification. What it actually said was “Runtime error X00111XXX01100. Please try again” which basically means the same thing.

Extreme Danger – Useful to Know

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Bit of a science lesson for you today, chaps.

Chennai is a coastal city in the tropics which means that most of the time it feels like your whole body is wading through pea soup and you have to push the air out of the way. The air is literally saturated with water and right now it is worse than ever. Today it was 32°C outside which might seem quite nice but the air humidity was 94%. Humidity is a measure of how much moisture is in a body of air and when it gets to 100% it means the air is completely saturated and can’t hold any more water – your sweat will simply pool on your skin as it has no where to go.

The human body keeps cool by sweating and then evaporating the moisture from your skin which works pretty well if it’s 32°C outside and the air is fairly dry, say 60% humidity or less. Above 60% humidity is where the problems start because less sweat is able to evaporate in to the already saturated air so 32°C with 60% humidity actually feels like 37°C because you’re not able to evaporate enough sweat to cool down.

As I said earlier, today in Chennai it was 32°C with 94% humidity which (apart from feeling like wading through water) makes it feel like a rather balmy 51°C. The American Government weather site has some reassuring information for temperatures and humidity like this: Extreme risk of death, do not go outside.

Useful to know!

Adobe, where are you?

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I now know why Adobe has such a huge problem with piracy in India and contrary to popular opinion I don’t think it’s because it’s too expensive. It’s far more basic than that: You can’t buy the flipping software anywhere! People are forced to get the cracks and pirated versions because you can’t buy the software from a website, you can’t walk in to a computer store; it’s simply not available.

I’ve been looking to buy one of Adobe’s Creative Suites, it’s not cheap and I could easily get a pirated copy, but I want a legitimate license. You’d have more success getting blood from a stone than finding somewhere to buy Adobe’s software in Chennai. If a person in India goes to the Adobe website they are referred to a number of “resellers” who either don’t have a website, don’t have working cell numbers or if they do have a website it was last updated in 1998 when Photoshop 2 was released.

Extremely frustrating. Adobe, if you are reading this: Your product distribution system in India is hopeless.

4 Years In India

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I’ve been in India for exactly 4 years today! It’s a bit of a milestone, didn’t think I’d be here for this long, which is what a lot of foreigners who come here end up saying. Infact I’ve been talking to a few expats who used to live here and they are saying they miss the place and would want to come back sometime.

We went out to an arts and crafts fair yesterday and it’s very revealing to see how many more foreigners are coming here, everywhere we looked there were westerners, families, businessmen, groups of friends etc. I’ve read that more and more people are looking to get opportunities in places outside America and Europe and given the pace at which India is growing it’s not surprising so many expats are ending up here.

My New Year’s Resolution

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I forgot to publish a New Year’s Resolution, I hope I’m not too late! I’m going to keep it simple this year, so here we go:

1. Learn English proper, like. I’ve been told by many people that I have a wonderful writing style (Naaw, thanks guys!), but I’ve also been told by an equal number of people that my grammar sucks, my girlfriend even told me that a little piece of her dies every time I use an errant “are” instead of “is”. To rectify this (and to save my girlfriend) by the end of 2012, amongst others, I will have finally mastered the common apostrophe, know the exact times when to use the semi-colon, the colon and of course the hyphen and be the foremost expert on the tricky difference between “which” and “that”.

2. Lose another 4kg. It doesn’t sound like much, it doesn’t need to be much, I just need to be lighter at the end of the year than I am now.

3. Turn 29. Well, I need to have at least one resolution that I’ll be able to stick to! I’ve now successfully turned 29

4. Go to bed early. If I’m going to turn 29 this year then I need to stop going to bed at 1am and stop writing blog posts at 12:30am like this one, even if it is a Saturday tomorrow.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, it should be good enough, I’ll see you in 2013 to see how we all got on.

Cow Theory

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I was forwarded this wonderful (stereotyped!) analogy of the world’s cultures yesterday so thought I’d share it here for everyone. Yes, it’s stereotyped but I think it hits the nail on the head in most cases!

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away…

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of Democracy….

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go to the pub for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

A GREEK CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You borrow against the cows from the Germans
You kill the cows and make souvlaki
You can’t pay the interest so the Germans lend you more money
You can’t pay the interest so the Germans lend you more money
You can’t pay the interest so the Germans lend you more money
You can’t pay the interest so the Germans lend you more money…

The Winner

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Yesterday I won a competition for a free privileged entry to an international social media seminar that is taking place in Chennai this week with the lead speaker from the famous SEOmoz company (which I’m really excited about!). You know, a lot of people say they never win anything and I am certainly one of them. My girlfriend asked me what the last thing I won was, I racked my brains and the best I could come up with was winning the Most Polite award at the annual Cub Scout (Great Bowden Cub Pack) summer camp when I was 9 years old. Apparently I always remembered to say my “please and thank yous” to Akela and Brown Owl. But I hardly mention that any more and might even take it off my CV under “Achievements”.