The culture of gift vouchers

Literally speaking and as per dictionary.com “gift” is a noun meaning “ something given voluntarily without payment in return, as to show favor toward someone, honor an occasion, or make a gesture of assistance; present” or “something bestowed or acquired without any particular effort by the recipient or without its being earned” . In the context of this note, I will abstain from other meanings like a special ability or something.

What is the reason behind giving someone a gift certificate? 

From a strategic and tactical perspective for retailers it works wonders. Just before Christmas when the retailers are struggling to cope up with demand the gift vouchers are available in abundance and when they are redeemed after new year – retailer are more than happy to see the lift in the sales. They shifted the demand from high period to low demand period in order to utilize their resources better.

We hardly know people enough these days. Hence buying a gift for someone is a real pain but I guess it is worth a try and effort.  Especially when you want to buy you a gift as a real gesture (not for the sake of formality like Boss's birthday) and I guess an effort needs to be put to understand the recipient as a person. A gift was never about the gift alone. It was always about the care and time spent in choosing something for someone you care and love. 

Do you like a gift vouchers? 

Personally speaking I don’t. I hate them it is like a short cut and means buying some gift for the sake of it. Well in my opinion a currency note would have been better at least every one will redeem it unlike vouchers at any place they choose with fewer terms and conditions. If that sounds rude what about a wire transfer – a gift certificate is socially acceptable way of doing the same thing. The difference is more like sipping single malt vs. country liquor and irrespective of where it comes from alcohol is injurious to health. 

Over the period of years I have come across situations when people asked “what do you want for your birthday”. This used to be more frequent in my younger years. Months before the occasion the wish list used to be ready. Some time it was as trivial as the new set of sketching pens, some time it was a watch sometimes more trivial things as well. As the count of years steadily increased (does it sound like am very old – am just 30 and you know what they say about it – 30 is the new 15) the number of people who asked this question suddenly decreased and I have started receiving vouchers. There is no fun to receive a voucher.

I guess we need to step back and preserve this beautiful thing called gift. I know it is complicated to ask someone or choose something on behalf of someone but knowing someone better was the idea of a gift. It’s a tricky line – we all don’t want to sound greedy but a voucher culture is not a substitute. 

Just for the sake of doing it, let’s go out and ask people what they want as a gift. A “Wish List” is a good idea to have – a lot of websites allow that. Or at least when someone pops up the let’s be frank share the information about the budget or at least give some options. A lot of people are afraid of dealing with this but I am sure this is not difficult compared to hundreds of complicated decisions you make every day. If you don’t like flowers please go out and tell people. If you want something special we can put it up on our desks.

Let’s preserve the personal touch of the gift and save it forever. And if you are looking for something to buy for me – please let me know. I will ask you the same question soon if I can’t make the decision on your behalf but please don’t send me a gift voucher.

What do you say. Do let me know :)

Democracy survives on Memento Man - you and me

Democracy survives on our short term memories not only in the world's biggest democracy but around the world. This is the whole premise which explains how the leaders even the ones with strong question marks on their deeds, character or whatever get re-elected. In some countries it is very obvious and in some it is very subtle but the point is our short memory snaps allow the culprits and tyrants to survive.

India is a big democracy and when the world big is used here it refers to a billion strong people with a complex system of governance. The question is how we forget all these so easily. To bring into perspective let's work on simple facts.

Let's go into the recent accolades, medals and appreciation for Congress (the current part in power) in India. Dr. Manmohan Singh with his cabinet and with the support of the allies like DMK and blessings of Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. How many big scandals or allegations can you remember? 

One of the colleague asked the question and here is the list we compiled together. It took us some time to recall. Here is the quick list.

a) Nuclear Deal special plan for MP's - money for vote
b) Common Wealth Games
c) 2G Scam
d) CVC Appointment
e) Adarsh Society
f) IPL - Tharoor resigned
g) Mumbai Blasts
h) Datewada Massacre
i) Kashmir Roits
i) Clemency plea filed by Ghulam Nabhi Azad for Afzal guru
j) Radia Taps

Probably Congress is setting new standards in terms of what it costs to the Indian ex-chequer and may give tough competition to any other corrupt government. Each of these was worth hours of prime time media coverage and kilometers in terms of print coverage.

And the last one on the list probably explains a part of how we forget so easily. Media plays an important part in making share the information is carefully screened and then propaganda fed to the voters. Even setting up especial envoys in media like Barkha Dutta and Veer Sanghvi ( as per 'Radia Tapes') to the extent of setting up questions for key interviews.

It is still a long time for elections and hence clean up but I guess we got to remember before we VOTE !

होली की शुभकामनाये

"होली की गुजिया रंगों के फुहार 

दही बड़े ठंडाई और दोपहर भर का खुमार 

कभी कभी धड़कन रुक सी जाती है,

कभी कभी पुराने दिनों की याद आते है"

२०११ एक और होली चली गयी - सुबह शाम की मेहनत में. 

ऑफिस से होटल और होटल से ऑफिस - हजारों मीटिंग और न जाने क्या क्या. जिन्दगी तेज़ रफ़्तार हो चली है और हम हजारों मील दूर चले आये है -  उन गलियों से जहा हम ने अपना बचपन गुज़ारा लेकिन फिर भी कभी कभी अनायास ही ऐसा लगता है कि कल ही कि तो बात थी.

No fly zone in Libya - What about Ivory Coast?

We as an International community alienate ourself from Ivory coast so easily and have been sympathizing with Jamsine in Libya. Look at the coverage of Ivory Coast in news. The condition is slowly moving to a civil war there. The helicopter gunships apparently sold by Belarus, armored vehicles are exchanging fire on the roads killing thousands everyday. For few days the media was interested but that was more in Belarus then in Ivory Coast. The UN is indeed present there but the scale of response there is minuscule compared to what we are agreed to do in Libya. Are the allies trying a regime change from "back door" - decide for yourself.


What we need is another Iraq or Afghanistan but looks like we have one in the making here. May be enough Iraqis or Afghanis were not enough we want Libyans added to that list. I pray that we don't have to see this happen.


For a second, let's step back and recollect all the words west has been associating with Middle East recently - democracy, freedom of speech, peaceful protests. West has even agreed to enforce a no-fly zone after the security council was convinced. Arabs, France, Britain and United States have been stepping up efforts to protect the people of Libya. They want to remove Gaddafi and are supporting the fight for basic human rights.


Let's step back and look at Ivory Coast.


Ivory Coast had an election recently. The whole world witnessed and declared the elections free and fair. Alassane Ouattara won the elections but Laurent Gbagbo never left power and today the democratically elected leader has been pushed into the corner. UN peacekeepers are helping him survive by providing day and night security while the government operates from a heavily fortified hotel. 
Ouattara recently broke three months of silence on the gunmen fighting to defend his claim to the presidency and said he officially recognized the former rebels as the legitimate army. So called incumbent Laurent Gbagbo was supposed to go out of office but refused and the situation today is  somewhere between a conflict and a civil war. Heavy fights are going on in the city of Abidjan.


Ivory Coast is the world's leading producer of Cocoa but I guess the impact on the world economy of the conflict is not enough. May be if they were the top producer of oil the condition would have been totally different. It's not just a coincidence that Libyan rebels have got so much of effort especially from the countries to which Libya exports energy to.


if Ivory Coast's cocoa was a replacement for Black Gold - would the security council allow external intervention there? Is the civilian life also measured in terms of world wide oil their country contributes. Isn't this vested interest?


Dirty economics and with Yen going up in the wake of the Japanese disaster -  are we all corrupt people trying to make a quick buck off the needy. No one wants to miss a chance on the possibility of Yen demand because Japan needs it to rebuild it's economy. We all say we are with Japan but I guess we don't care as long as the Tsunami or the earthquake didn't hit me or my loved ones - the point is we don't care !

Missed another birthday ...not anymore !

Are you good at remembering dates and occasions especially the birthdays and anniversaries?

This one is starting with a question and how you answer that question together with the fact that statistically speaking (obviously in my humble opinion and made up like most other statistical interpretations are biased by statistician’s perceptions) if you are “he” - the probability is higher that your answer will be affirmative. I guess Mother Nature programmed the fairer sex with the universal ability to remember these occasions. I accept it. I am so terribly bad at it that I once wished my parents one month before their anniversary. My moment of enlightenment and at the very moment of embarrassment I realized that I needed a solution and no number of reminders or whatever can help me.

Frankly speaking the whole ruckus around birthdays and anniversary has always been beyond comprehension for me. It’s just a bloody date or may be on the other extreme it’s kind of a personal new year. Approximately put there are about 3-4 million people being born in the world every day and every year going forward there will be an addition of about 3-4 million people who will share their birthday with me or with your girl friend or whatever ! Somehow for a King or a Queen it was a great sense of being in the center of the world but really speaking somehow I feel we are imitating Kim Jong II in some way. Flattery and pampering at its best but yes the whole world is doing many things that way and hence it is kind of in sync.

Anyways the embarrassment was painful. Necessity they say is the mother of invention and I wanted a fool proof way. We are not talking about any technique or gadget or anything at that level. I decided to simplify the whole process itself. Lots of thoughts and then I decided to reengineer the process itself. So on my birthday two years back I called up my buddies instead of waiting for their calls or accusing some of them for not calling. Some of them were overwhelmed and I am not talking about just friends these guys are the inner circle – sorry if you didn’t receive this call but I guess it was about 90% coverage and I indeed asked for a gift.  Please call me on your birthday.

I guess there are few things in life which work this way. I have been receiving calls throughout the year. I would have felt guilty about missing almost all of these birthdays but now I don’t have to. Sometimes the call is very simple. One of my friends just whispered “today is the day” – sometimes all you need is to be reminded because we are not absent minded folks. The gang here all remembers much more complicated stuff on top of their head but it’s just that we miss few things!

So I don’t know if you need a watch to know the day of week and date or may be your eyes move towards the nearest calendar but if it does and you are struggling too - try this one out and don’t forget to tell me J I will be eagerly waiting.

Quick Newbie Tip: Remote Desktop - Copy Paste Issue - Clipboard problem

If you work with windows remote desktop you probably know one of the top irritants :) All of a sudden the Cntrl-C between the local machine and the Cntrl -V on remote desktop will stop working. Irritating especially if file transfers between the boxes are restricted.

Easiest option is to log off and login again but that means closing everything on the remote session and then starting all over again too much for a lazy guy for me !

And then I try recollection there was something I need to kill and restart - something something. Yes if you are an old timer you know the issue is rdpclip.exe. Open task manager kill rdpclip.exe and start it again.

I wish MS could fix this irritant may be they already have but we are still on XP and 2003 R2 Servers -our company doesn't support a lot of heavy weight software on the flashy new windows yet.

Caged canary - Marilyn Buck

We are free.

We take it for granted - we might have complaints and constraints but still we are free to the extent to be called FREE. At least I always believed freedom was something so basic that it was free.

Then I read about a person Marilyn Buck.  When Marilyn Buck died last August 3, she had lived outside prison, on parole, for only twenty days. At age sixty-two, she had spent her last twenty-five years in various maximum security prisons. Before that, she lived years underground, supporting and taking part in actions with the Black Panther Party and later, the Black Liberation Army. Marilyn was a white woman who carried a great deal of pain, most of which came from her unflinching acknowledgement of the centuries of untold inequities suffered by African Americans and other people of color at the hands of “freedom-loving” white America.

I can't judge if it was right or wrong or I am not taking sides. Am not preaching here anything not even a point of view but for a second think this - a person spent almost whole of her life behind the bars and for what ? Some crimes - I let people decide what were the crimes and how much they mattered.

Let's not judge some one for a second. Can we at least grant her this freedom? An accomplished poet and translator this is probably her best poem. [This poem is read on the CD by Marilyn Buck. ]

Wild Poppies

I remember red poppies, wild behind the school house
I didn’t want to be there, but I loved to watch the poppies

I used to sit in the window of my room, sketching charcoal trees
what happened to those magnolia trees, to that girl?

I went off to college, escaped my father’s thunderstorms
Berkeley. Rebellion. Exhilaration!

the Vietnam war, Black Power, Che took me to Chicago
midnight lights under Wacker Dr. Uptown. South Side. Slapped
by self-determination for taking Freedom Wall photos
      without asking

on to California, driving at 3:00 in the morning in the mountains,
I got it: what self-determination means
A daunting task for a young white woman, I was humbled
      practice is concrete … harder than crystal-dream concepts

San Francisco, on the front steps at Fulton St.
smoking reefer, drinking “bitterdog” with Black Panthers and white
hippie radicals, talking about when the revolution comes

the revolution did not come. Fred Bennett was missing
we learned he’d been found: ashes, bones, a wedding ring
but later there was Assata’s freedom smile

then I was captured, locked into a cell of sewer water
spirit deflated. I survived, carried on, glad to be
like a weed, a wild red poppy,
rooted in life

Read more about her here : http://www.marilynbuck.com/