Gagan Kaul Blog

Banking Blues

Internet Banking, ATM accessibility, M-Banking et al. The new age banking mantras. And the banks providing these services are not very old entrants into the banking domain. The customer satisfaction is their only driving USP. And so it happened one fine day. Realising that my old bank was charging me too much for the ATM transactions, and limiting the number of times I can withdraw money from ATM, I thought of opening another account with a “modern tech-savvy bank”. It would provide me inter alia netbanking and infinite ATM transactions, the things I need the most right now.

I decided to approach ICICI Bank, known for its operational efficiency. I filled the Savings Account Opening request form on their website and after two days also mailed them about my desire to open a bank account. After one week, I received a mail confirming the receipt of my mail to them. A promise to make an immediate follow-up on my mail was made. The email exchange continued for one whole month, with the ICICI representatives making false promises about sending some customer representative to my place to complete the formalities. It was very disappointing to get such a response from a bank, that was topping the best banks list in the country; and the same bank for which the customer satisfaction was the dominant criterion for survival.

After another one week (one and a half months in total), I called up their customer executive who promised me to send their representative right away. After another three days, a guy from the bank finally turned up to take my signatures and a photograph. And now its been full two weeks, since that happened and I have no idea about my account opening status. And that too with a bank, where “you can open an account instantly”. Such goes their advertising campaigns.

I don’t know if such lapse of efficiency is taking place in my case, or is it the general mode of operability of the bank. My other friends also quote few such incidents; though more complaints are about their ATM cards getting stuck in the bank installed machines.

All this just leaves me wondering, whether I should not mind paying those extra bucks to my old bank, and be sure of great service and hassle free transactions always. Is Old really Gold?

Einstein’s Clock

An interesting article on NYtimes.com

What does it mean, Albert Einstein asked in 1905, to say that a train arrives someplace — in Paris, say — at 7 o’clock?

You might not think you need to know something as deep as relativity to answer such a question. But Einstein needed to answer the question to invent his theory of relativity, the breakthrough that wrenched science into a new century and enshrined the equivalence of matter and energy.

In his last step, after a decade of pondering the mysteries of light and motion, Einstein concluded that there was no such thing as absolute time, envisioned by scientists since Newton, ticking uniformly through the cosmos. Rather there were only the times measured by individual clocks. To talk about times and measurements at different places, the clocks have to be synchronized, he said. And the way to do that is to flash light signals between them, correcting for the time it takes for the signal to travel from one clock to another.

A simple prescription. Yet when Einstein followed it, he found that clocks moving with respect to one another would not run at the same speed. The modern age was born.

As Dr. Galison relates, before the advent of factories began to standardize life, and railroad systems with crisscrossing tracks made it imperative to know which train was where and when, there were too many times, one for every village.

In the last part of the 19th century, the coordination of clocks and the standardization of time had engaged the passions of nations, business leaders, astronomers and philosophers. The patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where Einstein worked, was a clearinghouse for patents on the synchronization of clocks.

In New England, the Harvard and Yale observatories were competing to sell time signals to the public, and in Paris pneumatic tubes snaked under the streets to synchronize the city’s clocks with blasts of air. Far from being a bit of abstraction by a loner genius, the clocks that Einstein used as examples in his papers were as familiar then as computers are today.

That is one of the messages of Dr. Galison’s new book, “Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time,” due out in August from W. W. Norton. Part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity, Dr. Galison’s story takes readers from the patent office to lonely telegraphers sitting in the rain in the Andes, from the coal mines of France to town councils in New England as it circles around the exploits of Einstein and his rival, the French physicist, philosopher and mathematician Henri Poincaré.

Read the full article at NewYork Times Site

Microsoft to Shift More Jobs to India

The world’s largest software maker, Microsoft, is moving several hundred support jobs from the United States to Bangalore, according to US media reports.

Fuelling the ongoing backlash against outsourcing technology jobs to India, the move has led to an outcry by the Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, which claims that at least 800 jobs will be lost to India. US media reports quote union sources who have gathered this information from current and former workers, claiming that hundreds of jobs will be lost.
Microsoft support centres, part of the company’s product-support services division, in Sammamish, Los Colinas, Texas, and Charlotte (North Carolina) are likely to be most affected. Each of these three sites employs 800 people.

A Microsoft Corporation India spokesperson, while declining to comment on the number of US jobs that will now be outsourced, said, ‘Microsoft has announced a pilot programme in Bangalore to support select professional products. Over the next few months, we will hire 100 support professionals in India as part of the pilot.’

Washington Alliance of Technology Workers president Marcus Courtney said the information (on moving jobs to India) completely contradicts Microsoft’s public position that the impact of their focus on sending work abroad is not going to affect US employees. ‘Clearly, Microsoft is starting to cut its US workforce and send work abroad to slash its labour costs.’

An IIT Every Year
An interesting article on IITs published in Times of India which I read on Swaminathan S. A. Aiyar’s site Swaminomics. He presents an idea of starting up an IIT each year in India. I think that will only lead to dilution of the present status the IITs hold as the pillars of excellence in education and research in the country. A rat race as mad as starting an IIT each year, would only lead to quantity without quality. And quality is what makes IITs stand out. The quality of teaching, students and professors. You can share your view with me :)). Here is a brief excerpt from the article:

“MANY institutions in India have gone downhill in the last fifty years. But the Indian Institutes of Technology are an exception. They are centres of excellence that are now recognised as world class. Their graduates are grabbed by multinationals the world over, and Silicon Valley teems with millionaires bred in the IITs. The infotech revolution which has suddenly made India a global player owes much to the IITs.

IIT alumni, many of whom have made fortunes in the USA, now want to do their bit for their country. Former students of IIT Bombay like Sudhakar Shenoy of the IMC Group plan to raise $ 150 million to upgrade facilities and faculty and lower fees in their alma mater. Kamal Rekhi, an infotech NRI who passionately wants to repay his debt to India, has talked of raising $ 900million to provide $ 150 million to each of the six IITs.

I am unable to join in the applause. The need of the hour is surely to expand the availability of IIT education, not to make a few ivory towers still more towering. Instead of making the existing IITs richer than ever, may I suggest that overseas Indians should set themselves a target of starting one new Indian Institute of Technology every year.”

Read the full article on Swaminomics site.