Sales skills

PG narrated his experiences with Multi-network marketing companies. These companies train the members in sales and marketing skills. They shed away their inhibition in meeting strangers and socializing with them. PG mentioned couple of incidents at the shopping malls when he went with his wife. The sales couples used to approach PG and his wife on some context. For example, the lady would start a conversation stating the girl looks beautiful. With such pleasantries, the ladies would start discussing. Obviously the guy would be left with nothing but to talk to the other guy (the sales guy who would be waiting for a talk or start one himself). At the end of the discussion, they would exchange the contact numbers. In a day or two, the sales couple would call and propose a business opportunity. The rest is the usual talk and conversion rituals.

The other ice breaking openings range from "I have met you somewhere" to "you resemble like my cousin" ...

In the first meeting itself, they would extract enough details about a person and use this detail to assess the suitability of the person into their gang.

Thou these kind of marketing skills improve the communication of people, unfortunately there is a chance of becoming socially out casted. After attending couple of sales seminars and trainings conducted by the company, the members are too obsessed with success and money. Their thoughts, mind, soul, house, car and whatever they have are filled with the company's motto, logo, posters, articles and other junks. They speak about the same to all the known circles they have. After a while, their friends and relatives would start avoiding them. Once their known circles are exhausted, they venture into unknown territories and circles.

Not sure how they come out and what happens further down. I guess these people's behaviour and social interactions are worth doing a research.

btw, I happen to buy (was led into buying) a small bottle of some super-powered medical capsules for super-duper amount. I am trying to resale that bottle to some bakra like me and never did that in this one year of attempts. I guess I need to attend one of those trainings.

Tips for health

My wife forwarded few articles related to health. She thinks I need to gain few good habits to maintain my well being.

sleepfoundation.org talks about myths and truth behind sleeping. Very interesting to know about new info and burst few old thoughts.

This article lists out 13 tips for overall healthy life. Topics like morning breakfast, planned food nutrition, exercise, social well being, dental hygiene, skin care, balanced mental composure, fruits, water, milk intake etc are discussed in detail.

If you suspect depression, here are few tips.

Land cost

Today VY, MsAD and myself went to Adigas. Good food.

VY was mentioning a piece of land in the city. Also, we were discussing about the appreciation of land price. Over the past five years, the rate had increased 10 fold in most part of the city. Not sure if such sudden raise was realized in any part of the country in the past.

Recently we happen to know of two BHK renting out for 21k. This is not aimed at hi-society ppl but for the upper-middle class (whatever that means; when we are at it, why is the middle class broken into three? Are there more divisions?). In the same area, a single BHK was shown to a bachelor for 14k.

A year back, there was lots of demand for rental houses. Never we could see a 'To let' board as people would occupy when there is a vacant portion. However, these days we see lots of boards of vacant houses. Many are not occupied for a long time. May be the rent had shooted too high and owners are rigid in spite of no takers. Even with such trend, there are umpteen building constructed all over the city and beyond.

Let us observe the progress and see how things move. Most probably we might have to put up with this raise as the money generators like IT industries are still growing with more activities. We can expect a saturation in IT sector once the cost of living raises in par with western countries. In such case, outsourcing might become costlier than inland development/service.

cost of music

Today we went to the shopping mall. Had lunch and then went to the bookstall. I wanted to buy refill for the diary. Quiet lazy! Each year while buying the refill, I use to resolute that for the next year I will buy during December. Never happened so, always it was by end of Jan.

Before getting the diary stuff, I was browsing through the cd racks and picked few music. While comparing the prices, I got the following idea.

• Old classical film songs are quite cheap. If it is 40s and 50s era, then you get those vcd for Rs 40 or so.
• Then comes the devotional section. Starts from Rs 60 and keeps going up. Most of the cds are for 125. This depends on the time people are invested to prepare the audio collection and how popular that theme is. Celebrity singers' work fetch above 200.
• Also looked at the drama section. The comedy drama collections are above 200
• The dvd prices usually starts at 350 to 400.

Most of the above are available in our street video parlour in mp3 format. Price? Rs 25 for each burn!

Bangalore riot

In a far, far land there lived a tyrannic king (as per Western view). Once his government was toppled, the people in that land held him guilty of genocide and other crimes any normal dictator would do. He was hanged.

A month later of that court ruling and execution, Muslims in Bangalore gathered to protest that act. Fine, their choice. However, what does that execution got to do with the peaceful people who were walking in the streets of Bangalore? Highly unlikely if anyone in Bangalore had any remote connection with hanging of that leader. (None of the Indian media held a sms polling for the hanging).

Anyway, why should our buses, shops, people be attacked when some activity happens half a globe away? If some pope guy comments negative about a particular community, why should my way to office be blocked?

Does such mobic riots happen in other parts of the world; particularly curious to know how the Islamic developing countries like Malaysia handle such world events.

Interaction in a website

GA and myself had discussion about the technology. We were going through the advantage and disadvantage of a website allowing users to interact to a contribution level. User participation may be through wiki kind of editable page, blogs or forums.

Advantage

• The site comes alive with lots of interaction, awareness and many useful activities
• An integrated website may provide multiple facilities like forum, catalog, customization, wish list etc (depending upon what the website is aiming to do and the audience)

Disadvantage

• Need for continuous monitoring of the posted articles for maintaining healthy quality of the website
• Required resources for addressing the queries raised by users
• Able to take ownership and responsibility of the website content

I tried convincing GA by the fact that a team of staff would evolve out of the user community. They would monitor the content and such team would be a strong resource. This will avoid burdening the site owners. The staff can answer the queries pasted by the users and if the queries require the owners' attention, the staff can raise a prioritized attention grabber.

Let us see what GA decides.

zaika!!

Today we went to the restarant, Zaika, in Raheja Arcade. Earlier this place went with the name Annambrahma. Now the same management had renovated the place.

Ambience is fine. Tasty North Indian food. Price as you can expect in any such posh restarant; around 150 to 200 per head.

Try it out.

T-Shirt slogans

Like to read t-shirt wordings? I am with you. Some people feel that it is not a good habit. If that is so, why do we have those wordings?

I wish there are few facility available in such t-shirts. To start with, we need a comment column just like this blog has. When someone feel like posting a comment on the wordings, the t-shirt should open-up a section for it ... okay, before we get carried away with further imagination, let us get into work.

Here are few wordings I had noticed, and wished to comment in this line.

No job, No girlfriend, No Problems
No life!

I like you, will kill you last
A killer with conscience

Virginity is curable
Guess the treatment involves some injection.

I am rich. Marry me.
Thanks for the invitation. Let us wait for the gay marriage clearance from the legal dept.

MBA - Master of Bad Activities
I guessed it after interacting with our HR


If you have any, post in the comments.

Bookmarks

The bookmarks I use are of wide variety. Off late, KPN bus provides a counter ticket while boarding. It is a good one for bookmarking. That too it helps a lot as I would start reading a book in the bus (their TV system is too loud while playing some stupid movie). When I go to bookshops, they give complimentary bookmarks with their advertisements. I get couple of more from them. Another favourite bookmarks are visiting cards!, either mine or whoever passes to me. If nothing is reachable, I tear a small portion of newspaper or waste paper for the purpose. As I don't like spoiling the books, I don't fold pages to mark them. I like the books which comes with a small thread to use as bookmark.

Now I am planning to design few bookmarks for myself. I want to distinguish the books I am currently reading, books I am yet to start and those which I have read. Want to place different colored bookmarks to separate these three categories. Hence I am planning to cut bookmarks out of red, orange and green thin cardboard. Red is for books yet to read, orange for ongoing books and green for completed one. Actually I don't need green marks, I could assume books without marks are completed one; but to match with fancy traffic colors, I can have green too.

If you have better suggestions, please pass on to me.

Thiruvasagam

Happen to hear Thiruvasagam as composed by Illaiyaraaja. A feast to ears and mind. It is a music blended with Eastern and Western instruments. The foreground goes with the classical Tamil lyrics, and mixed with English translated verses. The CD came with a booklet containing the lyrics. It is easy to listen the songs while reading them. My wife and myself used to pause at the end of each song and go through the meaning of the song. Overall nice experience and worth trying. Planning to play it frequently.

Breathability

Interesting to know something about breathing. My wife is submitting a thesis on breathing. She had done some experiments on how deep breathing helps in improving the coupling of heart and lungs. She explained some fundas like amount of air we intake per minute, how it is related to respiratory rate and intake capacity. There is a cool formula.

TV * RR = MV

Here TV is tidal volume, RR -> respiratory rate and MV is minute volume. TV is how much air we inspire in one breath. RR mentions how many times we inspire per minute. Multiplying these two numbers, we get the total volume of air we intake per minute; this MV is required for our body. The breathing system works efficiently when the TV is increased and RR is reduced; in other words, we should fetch maximum air during each breath and also reduce the number of intake. That way the organs involved in these operations will be used less and effectively.

While understanding this, I was able to relate to a familiar concepts in computer networking. When we have a greater than 2 tier architecture, typically we have clients and server. The clients keep pinging the server to retrieve data. The network efficiency is achieved by reducing the number of round trip to the server and by increasing the data transfer in each trip.

Awesome similarities.

Reading classics

So far I had seen two classifications in Indian classical literature. The first category narrates some event, person or a story. Either events and person are explicitly named to identify or portrayed as generic characters like hero, heroin, mother etc.

The second category deals with morality/code of conduct/mannerism of people, social norms and ethics. There are many such books. Other day, one such book was lying in my desk. Friend of mine picked the same and glanced through it. He wasn't very happy about what he was reading. He felt those do s and donts were impractical; also a waste of time to go through such materials.

That was an interesting remark. Are all our ancient wisdom a waste of time? I was thinking in this line. Here are few thoughts came out.

In our modern age, we have hundreds of authors writing self-help, personality development books. In a sense, these books are the continuous progeny of the ancient moral texts. Most of the do s and donts of a by gone era may not be applicable today. However, we cannot throw away all of them as useless ideas.

If they are not applicable today, why should someone read them? I read to gain an insight into the ancient world. What was their social practices? Which are the pressing issues they had to address? Reading history itself has lots of advantage. A good reason for human being to go through history pages is not to commit the same mistake again.

Apart from these mundane reasons, there are recorded facts and findings which stands good in spite of the deadly factor called TIME. For example, recently I was reading a newspaper article about harmful effects of hot water bath. Due to regular usage of hot water for head bath leads to headache, memory loss and other brain related issues. This is due to sudden raise in the temperature during bath. Mainly this affects the brain. Since this info was new to me, I was surprised to read this; also worried because I am take hot water head bath on a daily basis. Found a remedy for the above situation in an ancient literature. Different protocols are suggested for cold water and hot water bath. Following that could reduce the effect of the above brain attack.

Suggestion to my friend is, to read books of wide range and variety. One need not follow everything written in the books. However, it is essential to expand our horizons by exposing to different ideas.

Strange practices in funerals

Loud beat of drums, merry dance by drunkards, bursting crackers ... these are common in Chennai funerals. Somehow I don't understand this custom. Why are people happy about the death. Are they feeling happy for the person to pass away from this sorrow filled world or are they relieved from the pain created by that person? :-)

Upon googling, I found that such funeral dances are practiced at different parts of the world like South Africa, China, Ancient Rome and Egypt. hmm, we have/had company.

Anyway, a recent news in the paper related to funeral was amusing. Villages of Eastern China have a belief that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured. In order to achieve this target, the relatives try ingenious practices. They hired stripteasers!! Here is the video. Also, news at BBC News.

Later the parties were arrested and such practices are banned in that area.

Wondering how people interpret believes and twist the original thinking into drastic practice. If there had not been any law enforcement on this new approach, soon people would have assumed this as a local customs.

Elephants

Read a small book on elephants. Amazing facts about them.

When we think about capturing elephant, we recollect the familiar method of digging a pit and camouflage it by leaves and branches; and capture the elephant that falls into it without knowing the same. This book illustrates another method to capture an elephant herd. This involves thousands of men working as a team. They dig a massive excavation which can hold may be 100s of elephants. Thick teak stems are placed inside the pit. Imagine a big circular well which is planted with teak close to the inner wall. A heavy door is available in a portion of the wall. A slope is raised from this door up to to the ground level.

Once the construction of this trap is readied, they locate the herd. Start making loud noise with instruments (hmm .. it would have been awesome to listen to hundreds of instruments). They direct the elephants towards the slope and finally into the well. After getting them in, they lock the door.

Elephants are starved, so that they don't have enough energy to fight back. People walk in through the teak columns with spear. They check the elephants, if found not suitable, they release them in the wilderness. Each elephant is assigned to a mahout. The wild elephant is approached with 2 tamed elephants until it is tamed.

This looks like old method. Modern hunters use darts to capture animals as a faster and easier means.

5k New year party

PG was mentioning about the New Year party he was invited for. The party is priced at 5k per couple for THE night. He got a free pass, hence planned to attend and later had to drop the plan as his uncle happen to visit him. The discussion went on to note the cost of such parties and the worth of the same.

VY mentioned such parties are considerable only if we get free passes. JB mentioned the risks in driving during the late nights. Apart from the drunkard drivers and rash drivers, there will be eve teasers all over the city - drunkard eve teasers are still bad. I guess the city looses its safety belt and goes crazy. It is better to stay at home.

Have a small, controlled gathering at home, plan for some games, food and fun. With mild music in the background, I guess nothing outside can come close to it.

Difference in taste

SDP had come to the country on a visit. VY and myself joined him for lunch.
We were discussing about different restarants and the taste.

The food prepared by Indian restarants at US have a different taste compared to what we get in India. May be the ingredients are too refined and hygenic. Most of us prefer the taste in India.

Seems like the Chinese food available at US is closer to the authentic Chinese preparation. In India, the Chinese restarants are highly Indianized with spices of India.

SDP was mentioning the Shalimar, a restarant in SFO. Seems like it is a very small place and got a great ambience. However, the food taste pulls lots of crowd.

The secret of an Oracle

Guess you have gone through the belief on future prediction.

Such belief seems to be a weakness, and a lack of self confidence in doing things.
Where there is a weakness, there will be business. Hence the astrology is a flourishing business, if done in the right manner.

Presenting my views on how a future-reader or a horoscope analyst can tell about our future. Trying to cover as per the reality, may be few points are over-stated or under-stated.

Telling about future is a really a trick, by practice anyone can gain. It is just like how a magician does the trick without exposing the truth to the audience. Future reading involves more of psychology, semantics of words and presence of mind.

Just listen to someone, may be a stranger for five mintues. If possible, try to open up his/her mind to let out the worries or issues troubling him. Just in five minutes you will gain a load of details about their habit, family background, their problem solving techniques, attitude towards life and n number of other inner, finer details. With that information, it will be easy to extrapolate their behaviour and what they will most likely do.

If a person trusts an astrologer kind of guy, then they will start believing whatever he says. That is a positive reinforcement of statements in the mind. Once the person is convinced of the future prediction, the mind start obsolving that fact into deeper part of the mind, may be at sub-consious level. For eg, if the prediction is made that business will pickup better from the month of May, then the person will keep repeating that in mind. By May, the person will be fully charged to do something in business; with such positive spirit it might be possible that the prediction comes true.

I guess Neuro-linguistic programming courses does something like this. If the prediction is positive, it makes everyone happy. However, when the negative predictions are made, it might put down the effort of people. The predictor might have given negative prediction just to have equal number of postive and negative predictions for his clients. (If he keeps telling only good things, people will loose faith).

Semantics too help in analyzing the thought pattern of a person. It tells why the person is trying peep through the future and more importantly, what he is looking forward to happen.

What about the planetary explanations, palm reading, face reading, naadi stuff, parrot-card, and zillions of tools and techniques? In my opinion they are jargons used by the future-reader to gain credibility. Also, to have the art of future-telling to himself rather than make it public.



Why do we need to know about the future? Why can't we enjoy the future as it uncover itself?

Had any astrologer won a lottery?

Why do people return to them inspite of umpteen number of prediction failures? (If a prediction fails, the astrologers have n number of sub-clauses to justify why the prediction had failed, or still worse .. blame it on the customer for not strictly following his prescription)

hmm .. I guess this craze will dissolve only when people shed their fear about future. Seeing the history, I am afraid that such a reformation is close to impossible. All around the world, at all times, from kings to papuer queued in front of the fortune-teller to know something.

Divorce process in Islam

We had an impression that it is easy to divorce under Islamic rule. Folks suggested one should get converted to Islam in order to get a quick solution.

MS clarified certain aspects of this myth. Seems like there are n number of clauses and it is not an easy task as we all imagine. (Definitely not as easy as saying Talaq Talaq Talaq).

However, the wikipedia has mentioned husband talaqing without any other third person as witness, and controversy over allowing text message for talaq.

Seems like there are diverse practises and the exact process will depend on situation to situation. Also, theory might differ from the reality.

Indian and western languages

While reading the book Word Power, I was impressed with the etymology analyzing technique. Another surprise was to find Greek and Latin words to have similarity with Samskrit and other Indian languages. Tried putting few of the words here.

Most of the last column are Latin
eka each
onru, onthu one
dvi dual, two
tri tri, three
chatur quad
pancha pentashut
che sexa
sapta septa
asta octa
nava novem
dasha deci

Samskrit and Latin coincide amazingly for 11 to 29 (that is the last number I could find in the page :-)
vimshati viginti

Naama Name
naukaa nau (boat or sea thing)

upari up
adhaka under

jeevan genesis (life)

The 'a' prefix in Samskrit is to mean anti, for eg, avidya (without knowledge). Greek also used 'a' to mean anti, for eg, atom (that which cannot be cut).

The prefix vi in Samskrit has 16 meaning based on the context and the root word it joins with. Two common meaning it derives are negation and intensification. Examples are placed at Beautiful names. The Latin prefix "in" is a close cousin of "vi". The words indecent, injustice for negation and invaluable for intensification are note worthy comparison.

Guess an detail analyze of these two language might throw some more light on the similarity. I tried google to find any such work. Nothing noted in the first page of search.

Belief in predictions

We had a discussion on belief people have on horoscope. I was thinking in that line and try to reason the unshakable faith.

Any living being is programmed to seek happiness and to avoid unhappy situations. Any complex feelings and interaction can be brought down to these two instinct. Fear is one of the factor bringing such unhappy feelings. Fear of repetition of past unhappy moments, fear of loosing the current happy occasions and fear of untold future.

Uncertainty of anything is an uncomfortable thingy for human. I am very much comfortable coming to my office and going back to my home. I don't have any odd feelings; in fact these two are my second nature and hence not in my mind while dealing at these two places. If I had to go to a new place, I might feel awkwardly uncomfortable, very much aware of my conduct there, will check how people see me. That is due to the unfamiliar environment which made me out of normal behaviour.

Also, uncertainty is risk. There is a chance of success and failure. We would like to gather as much of data as possible so that the risk factor is reduced in order to increase the probability of success. In other words, we would like to reduce the uncertainty factor.

Sample questions : "Has anyone visited xyz place recently? Can you help with good accommodation referral, travel condition, place of attraction etc .. ". This is for reducing the uncertainty.

The future being uncertain, we would like to 'see' something over the time-line and gain something. For eg, if a cat crosses my way, today will be bad. We try to associate something happening now or before and predict something in future. If some good prediction is made, we feel confident to do some activity; otherwise that activity would have left us in double-minded dilemma.

If someone claims to tell our future, we are skeptical initially. However, we wish the person can predict accurately. With such biased expectation, we evaluate a fortune-teller or a future-reader. How the person gains the credibility is dealt in a future article.

Thou the prediction may not be correct, still we would like to consult with such people, just to make sure things are fine. Also, to know something about the future instead of marching ahead without any data.

Can future be predicted? Is there a fool-proof method to know something ahead of time?
Watch for the future article :-)