THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

Mallika is a category 5 hurricane. She stuck India years back and refuses to subside.The most interesting attribute of Hurricane Mallika is that she's hit India coast-to-coast and the only property she's damaged is the male heart.Worst still, she's going stronger by the day.Initially she was designated as category 2.Nobody knows where she's heading next. Hurricane Aishwarya is now designated as category 1, which means she's really not much lethal anymore. We also had a Muskee Tornado few years back, but its effect gradually waned over time. In any case this tornado damaged the female hearts alone. Lets keep an eye as Mallika progresses towards the Hongkong coasts!

8 PM last evening just as I reached home from work I received a call from my cousin sister in Jalgaon. Her husband landed in Chennai a few hours earlier, she said. Delighted to hear that, I said, BTW, where is he? He was on his way to Vellore to attend a relative under medical care. Unfortunately, he had left behind his mobile phone in the auto from Chennai airport to the city as he headed for Vellore. Too bad, I said, this is a bad city. Close the connection with the service provider IMMEDIATELY I said. She said I did not get her point .The autodriver had just called her and he wants to return it! Interesting, I said . My wife took the challenge of speaking to the autodriver as she speaks Tamil. He said he has a stand near the airport and if we come there, the instrument is all ours. See you in twenty minutes we told him. At plus 15 minutes we bundled into the car and headed for the airport. Everybody knows the Guindy/GST road traffic. We reached there at plus 60 mins(9 PM)

With Google's creeping onslaught on the desktop space, Microsoft is in the danger of being reduced to middle layer of customer experience , Never mind the XP in Windows. Google is setting the standards through engineering innovation, and by keeping the customer in the center. Google has attacked Microsoft two fold - One by expanding the customer experience in a space that has hitherto been believed to be already exploited to full capacity, and second by building ab-initio innovations that have leveraged the computing power of the day, including good internet bandwidth, to give completely new experience. The first category includes chat , email and photo organising softwares, among other things. The second category includes the new products, such as blogger, Google Earth, Google Print and Google Maps. This is also an example that innovation by a challenger can drive the marketing budget of a leader hollow, if the leader's strategy is build around self and not around the environ

Just finished reading 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman. The subtitle suggests it is the ' A brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century '. Once again an attempt at creating a stereotype. This book is targetted at western audiences, who have probably read about outsourcing etc through the media, but have not had the chance to read it in the form of a story, something the three times Pulitzer awardee is very good at. Mr. Friedman conjures up images of Indian IT companies as replacing the jobs in the US, but he forgets some parts of the story, viz, most of the Indian Tier 1 IT services providers have strong sales arms in the US, which have many an American employed.Outsourcing is not new at all. A famous acedemician recently commented that Americans outsourced their undergraduate education to India decades ago. That remark, made half in jest, alluded to the large number of Indian students who went to(and still go) US to after earning their basic engine