Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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I will skip this week’s Friday Update as I have limited access to internet. This entire week I haven’t logged on to gtalk, Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin, Google Reader or replied to any emails or comments on my blogs. My online activity has been limited to checking my primary email account and trading in stocks.

The coming week looks real tough with all these mammoth tasks pending.

P.S.: Looking forward to it.

2nd October came and went. It was Mahatma Gandhi’s Birth Anniversary. I have read a lot about Mahatma Gandhi and with my limited comprehension, I can say that Gandhi is one of those few people who had real powers. Powers to communicate, connect with the masses, use un-conventional thinking to get more ideas, lead by example, so on and so forth. If I can develop about one-tenth of his people skills, I can bring about a larger revolution that he got. Anyways, getting back to interesting developments over the past week,

Business

• Jagdish Khattar (the man who ran Maruti for about 15 years and recently retired as Managing Director) is back and has launched his new venture. Carnation Auto India will be a chain of multi-brand automobile sales and service outlets. (link to news release). Awesome idea. This is a one of those industries where the unorganized sector rules the roost and as we have seen in the past, anyone who can “organize” or “brandize” even a small share of market, stands to gain a lot (Organized Retail, Jumbo King Vada Pavs etc.). In terms of competition, the ones I can think of off the hand are Mahindra’s First Choice and another one by Shah and Sanghi Motors. Need to read more about this. And probably write more on this brandizing unorganized sectors. Truly a new new thing that I will look forward to.
• Warren Buffet invests $3bn in GE. This is second investment in a week. Last week he put money behind Morgan Stanley Goldman Sachs (EDIT: I have no clue how I could have got this wrong. Thanks Shefaly.) However this time I disagree with him. I have worked with GE and my limited experience, I can say for sure that the management is over-hyped and is not up to the mark. They simply dont know how to allow employees to take risks. And the mangers have no clue how to run the show.

Interesting Tidbits

• On their 10th anniversary, Google created this page where you can search the index of Google as it was in 2001. Google Search in 2001. The world has changed like anything in last 7 years. Google for things as simple as India to as complex queries as “prime minister of India” and you will be surprised.
• Discovered Jose Gonzalez. His Heartbeat was used by Sony for their Bravia (Balls) commercial. Love the way he strums his guitar. He makes me want to learn playing guitar all over again. May be I will pick it up soon.

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• Finally wrote the Credits page for this blog. It was long overdue. Please check it out.
• Have started using visual thinking and visualizations in my blog post. Although it is more time consuming for me to actually create these visualizations (given my limited skills on an image editor) but I think the image gets the message across faster and better. Thanks to David Armano for inspiration.
• The govt. of India has finally banned public smoking. This I think is a welcome move. I dont know if smoking is any good/bad, it certainly irritates me and I would rather live in a smoke-free India. ITC can crib as much as it can but the move definitely is a positive one.

Even though this has been a short week but so many interesting things have happened. The world moves ahead. One baby step at a time. P.S.: This post is being published on Saturday. I was traveling on Friday.

The highlight of the week has to be turmoils in the financial markets. Banks are trying to buy each other, all the while knowing that its a wretched business. Lehman Brothers have decided to file for bankruptcy. Apparently Chinese banks are buying out the biggest and most influential financial players in America. Crude oil is undecided whether it wants to stay above USD 100 or not. Dont really know what impact would this have on India and it is really funny the way news anchors are predicting the doom and god knows what.

There are no other highlights to really speak of. However there were few interesting things that I can talk about.

Interesting bits this week

• Yahoo’s customer service got “tricked” to reset Sarah Palin’s email address. If you don’t know who she is, you must be living in a cave. Please come out. And no one is at a blame here but it certainly highlights the perils of being a public figure. You reveal so much about yourself on the Internet that it becomes really easy for random strangers to find out things about you and invade your beloved privacy.
• Finally filed my tax returns. Hope I am not fined too much for delaying it by 4 months ;) The good thing is that you can file it online.
• Although I dont talk about work on this blog but two awesome things happened. I have to talk about em. Raj’s commercial for Pantene finally went on air (see it here - it already has more than 7000 hits). And second, we revealed Appy Fizz’s new look. He looks totally cool in his new avatar. The commercial is finally on air (here).
• I am completely hooked on to a Facebook game called Whos Has The Biggest Brain. I play it like 20 times a day without fail and my highest score there is about 2300. What is yours .. ?

Look forward to next week. Hope it brings more excitement and action. If I look back at my recent weeks, apart from sporadic instances of excitement, things have really been quite. I guess I need a spark. Where would it come from? Any clues? Hints?