A rainy day in the life of a Saraspur Ahmedabad Citizen

It hasn't rained for weeks now. You know that rain is badly needed - for crops to grow, water to come unhindered from your tap. You pray for rainfall whenever you kneel down in front of the Almighty. Suddenly it starts pouring from the sky...you feel overjoyed as if those prayers have been answered. The rainfall continues and you feel like going out and dancing in the rain expressing your joy to the skies above.

After two hours, suddenly the emotions of joy slowly turn into emotions of fear and anxiety. The roads outside your house start getting flooded. You cannot help but notice that the colour of the water is not as pure as what was falling from the sky. This is deep green and blue, with all the dirt from the street and more, mixed into the water. The water inches up on your footsteps slowly but steadily. You are well aware that the soil where your neighborhood stands is at low sea level, so if the rain continues soon this dirty sickening water will be inside your house.

Once the fear has taken hold you start taking counter measures to save your valuable belongings which you have taken so much effort to accumulate over the years. You have just finished fasting and after a long and tiring day you just want to be in bed and relax. Instead you start putting bricks below your sofas, refrigerator, furniture, picking up rugs to save them from the wrath of the dirty water outside. The rain is falling at a slow pace but the water outside is rising much faster just as the heartbeat inside your chest.

The phone rings and on the other end is your son who lives outside the country. You explain the situation to him and there is no telling on how anxious he becomes. Partly because he knows that there is nothing he can do to help and you have to bear this all alone. Both of you pray that the Almighty will command the skies to hold the rain for a while just so that the flooding outside recedes. Inside your heart you feel a strange contradiction, you want the rain, still at this moment you just want it to stop. Suddenly the electricity goes out and you are left in the dark of the night with a few candles wondering what is to happen next...including the fact that you may miss your fast for the next day.

Over the years, a number of your friends have moved out of this neighborhood - one of the reason maybe just this constant flooding every monsoon with dirty deep blue and green water. They have cajoled you into moving out as well but circumstances have not allowed you to do so. In that same time you have seen Ahmedabad develop constantly, new roads, new multiplexes, shopping malls. The Government is pouring money into the infrastructure everywhere...everywhere except your neighborhood. Even the basic gutter system is not in place to route the monsoon rain. On top of that the surrounding textile and chemical plants take the opportunity of the monsoon rain to dump all their dirty polluted water into the gutters thus flooding them even more, which explains the colour of that water. Of course, the Government has done nothing to stop them either.

You hear that there is a gutter system that is being worked on after more than 35 years but it will not be ready this monsoon. Maybe next monsoon...but it maybe too late for tonight. If the Government does not find providing basic hygiene of clean water and soil a priority for the citizens of Saraspur, Ahmedabad it may not happen for another 35 years. After all, it is more important to build new and clean malls than to let this dirty water flood houses and potentially cause epidemics which can endanger lives of many.

So you ask - Is the solution only to move out of here and pray for whoever is left behind? Or is it to demand from your Government that this issue be fixed right now, right here. Is it too much to ask? Is your Government so incapable, so incompetent that it cannot fix this simple but important problem. It has been a long night already and you are tired after a long ordeal. Tonight you want to just go to sleep with the prayer in your heart that the water outside just remains at your footsteps and Almighty holds the rain for a few hours. Whether the incompetent rulers of your town listen or not, you still hope that you will live to see the day when there is no more deep blue and green water outside every time it pours from the skies...until then the contradictions that your heart feels tonight will remain...and the Almighty will not judge you differently for them.

Voice over LTE - is it a good idea?

LTE or Long Term Evolution is the 4G technology that is anticipated to be available to US cellphone users sometime next year. All eyes are on this technology to deliver broadband speeds over the air anytime anywhere. Depending upon the cost there may not be an en masse adoption of the technology and maybe limited to enterprise customers. From a service provider perspective then the ROI may not materialize in the first 1-2 years.

Enter Voice over LTE. Cost senstivity is haunting 3G cell phone service as it now reaches maturity. For service providers, who either with limited spectrum positioning who are already choking on their 3G networks or elevating CapEx to continuously upgrade their RAN networks to push more voice users through them, it makes sense to move the voice traffic over LTE. For these operators it is critical then that the LTE equipment can be seamlessly integrated in their current RAN architecture as well as be compatible with the legacy 3G network.

I agree with one of my colleagues observation "for some service providers Voice over LTE is the only long term competitive edge especially if these service providers do not have a large base of customers willing to spend $$ to get high speed data services". Basically reduce cost to maintain or improve ARPU.

It remains to be seen which of the service providers will adopt and launch Voice over LTE as the challenges of maintaining circuit switched type voice service over a backbone IP network remains - maybe we can borrow a page from the history books as land line phone was (and still is) systematically displaced with VoIP.

Celebrating India's 62nd Independence Day

After 62 years of independence, India has become one of the most formidable economic powerhouse in emerging markets...in fact is one of the select few who are in such a position despite being under colonial British rule for more than a 100 years. Even though the poverty gap is rising, slums abound in metro cities, and lack of infrastructure, we all can take a deep breath and feel proud of how far we have come.

I attribute this independence day to the common man/woman/child in India who despite the challenges are motivated to improve their lifestyles and in the process make India as prosperous as it can be. Happy Independence Day!

Is more spending the only way out for the US economy?

Yes, we all have heard it several times. If the US economy has to come out of recession it will be on the shoulders of me and you the US consumer. So open up your pocketbooks and show some green! Is it really?

Let's focus on the micro economics for a second. I as an individual have no money to spend - so I decide to issue SSK bonds which are the safest because they are backed by me...of course you know me - I am the most dependable person in this whole world - I will never go bankrupt. Of course some people will buy the bonds give me the money and life goes on. Until one day, suddenly some of these bondholders tell me it is time to pay up. Chapter 11 sound familiar at that time! We are in a similar situation on the macro economics side.

Sometimes I naively feel that the micro and macro spending principles are the same. You earn some, you spend some and save some for later. However, it is of course more complicated than that otherwise I would be a successful financial advisor earning top $$ in New York :) In any case, to me the solution is not more and more spending but to create opportunities of organic growth...think green initiatives...not the type where you would spend your entire paycheck on grocery from Whole Foods. Revitalizing the manufacturing sector in US and reduce cost of goods produced here. Yes health care reform is necessary and so is the reduction of dependence on foreign oil. Along with that we have to figure out a way of becoming competitive on the front of labor costs since it directly relates to cost of goods produced. Government subsidies belong to these areas rather than "Cash for Clunkers" which is not only benefitting US car companies but more the foreign car companies since in general they have more fuel efficient cars.

...or maybe we will just go issue some more bonds...you know how a stock trades...there has to be a buyer for someone who is selling...even if it is at $.01.