For one, more than half the people don’t have patience, and a good part of that group lack any sort of brains. Honking seems to be a religion here.

“Hey, you are in my way” – HOOONK
“Hey, I want to overtake” – HONK HONK HONK
“You there, your car is dirty” – HONK
“My car is bigger than yours” – HONK
“I want to scratch myself” = HONKKK

The answer to any problem is to honk. Relax your shoulders, tighten up your wrists, insert a proverbial earplug into your ears, reach for that horn, and let it blare. Oh, how irritating is that sound. Every time I hear someone honk unnecessarily, I feel like getting out of the car and slapping the guy’s face 180 degree around.

But then, like I said, more than half the people on the road lack common traffic sense and are generally devoid of gray matter. I am driving along at 20-30kmph on the road, there is a guy on the right side who wants to cross, he sees me approaching, I am thankful that he sees me (as I don’t have to impart a warning honk), I come closer and closer as he is seeing me, AND THEN he decides that this is the perfect time to dawdle across the street to reach the other side. ##%^&@&

I ask – “What was he smoking?”. All this while he is seeing the car coming. He could have crossed earlier, or after I had passed, but no, he decides that he is entitled to make me test my brakes. I jam the horn and apply my brakes and hope that he has enough sense to up his pace at the last minute to avoid the car.

Oh, and then there are stupid cab drivers who weave in and out of traffic like they are enacting a Nagin film. There are these highly inspirational auto-rickshaw drivers who decide that the white lane marker is drawn so that they should drive their front wheel exactly on it. Either they think it is a test of skill, or they have had one too many checks for drunken driving.

Net effect is that they drive bang in the middle of the road at a speed that is just enough to keep you confused whether you should be in the 1st or 2nd gear, without offering you any space to overtake on either side. It is at these times that you wish some customer flags them down so that they can suddenly swerve to the left without any warning indicator, and at least leave the right lane free for you to overtake.

At times like these you realize that it is not a crime to Honk. Better safe than sorry as they say. So what I do these days is that I just roll up the windows and play some music, so that I am not irritated by the honking of dullards around me. As for me honking – I am still learning the “Art of Honking”, as I still feel it is a crime to honk for no reason. I have to get over my reluctance to honk for no reason.

Some rules of thumb for new and inexperienced drivers out there who don’t know when or why to honk.

You are approaching an intersection – Honk and pass
You are taking a turn – Honk and pass
You are changing gears – Honk and make those around you aware
You decide to change lanes – Screw the indicator, just keep honking until people slow down to see  what you are upto
You see a gap develop between your car and the one in front – Honk like there is no tomorrow, so that a biker or an auto-wallah doesn’t manifest themself out of thin air and try to slot their vehicle into that gap
You see a cabbie around you – Just HONK for no reason, as you never know what they might do.
You see an auto or a biker – Again HONK like crazy, it irritates them and they don’t have any window to roll up and drown the sound

Oh, and do remember – who has the bigger horn and blows it the longest, gets the right of way. There couldn’t be a simpler traffic rule anywhere else in the world.

… And it’s fun when you are stuck in hour long jams and are bored with the radio. Orchestrate your own horny music.

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Critical Attrition Rate (or CAR) is a term that I coined up while thinking about attrition and how it badly (or goodly?) affects a company. Most companies are plagued by attrition and most have either given in to this and just keep on hiring to keep their headcount. However, I believe that attrition has to be treated judiciously and a key to that is to understand how to increase retention and why to encourage attrition.

Lets get down to the brass tacks. Why does someone stick to a company, or what to join a company? I believe that there are mainly 3 factors at play here. Pay, Career Growth, and Work-Life balance. I don’t think there are many other important reasons other than these three.

Pay – Keeping all other factors constant, the more the pay, the higher the retention. The lesser the pay the more the attrition. Simple math.

Career Growth – More opportunities to grow – say promotions as a lead or a manager and you might be happy to be in the company. Spend 6-8 years as only a developer and you might feel the world is moving on while you are stuck at one place.

Work-Life Balance – This is very important for those people who are not concerned about pay or career growth. This is how most people in this category would think – “So fine, I can live a decent life with the money I make, and I am happy being a developer. At least I can go home by 6 and enjoy my life. I am not complaining about my pay and my career, so don’t expect me to stay in office 14 hours a day”. Work life balance is mostly a balance favoring life. The more time the company lets you devote to life, the lesser the attrition. I am classifying work satisfaction too in this category. You will tend to lean towards what gives you more satisfaction. If work gives you more satisfaction, then you will tend to stick to a company that gives you good work to do, even if you have to clock 14 hours a day for it. On the other hand, this is the group of people that you have to be careful with as one bad move (as far as the employee is concerned) on the part of the company’s strategy or roadmap and this person will be out in no time. However, I believe these kind of people are a minority and we have to give more importance to the people who tend to lean away from work.

I would like to broadly classify this into money and satisfaction. Higher money and higher satisfaction increase retention. Less of these leads to attrition. The second and third factor above are directly related to satisfaction.

This brings us to the discussion on what makes a company tick. A company cannot just do philanthropic work all day and still cut a profit. They have to make money. A company has to survive. It has to sell a product and make some money while doing so. A company is judged based on several parameters by the shareholders, investor, board of directors and so on. A few terms that come into mind here are the profitability, revenue, operating costs, operating margin. Basically, the company has to spend as little money as possible and gain as much money as possible. To sum it up, if a company does what is good for it, it will lead to attrition. Too much attrition as we know is definitely bad, and too little attrition is also bad as we had a first look in the previous post. Trying to bring down attrition is also bad for the company, we will see how.

Attrition is controlled by money and satisfaction. Simplest way of keeping attrition in check is to pay huge salaries. This directly impacts operating margins, bringing the company down. No, not good for the company.

What about work-life balance? Usually work-life balance is characterized by the facilities and benefits that the company offers. Such as free food, snacks, gyms, health clubs. sports and other activities within the office and so on. All these cost a lot of money to set up, and a good deal of money to maintain. Again operating margins take a big hit.

Hence, you can keep the employees, on one hand, and the shareholders and investors, on the other hand, happy at the same time. Your investors are of supreme importance to you as a company, hence they get the preference no matter what. Keep them happy by showing them the profits and revenues, and you know at whose cost this comes.

Career Growth – This is an interesting topic which will build the case for attrition as well. The management structure of a company is in the form of a pyramid. For every 10 developers, there is a manager, for every 10 manager, there is a senior manager, for every 10 of them, there is a VP, for every 10 of those, there is a Director and so on… you get the drift? Hence when it comes to a promotion within a team, there might be 2-3 employees of similar experience and similar competency. But the team can have only 1 lead. Making one of these 3 a lead automatically reduces the satisfaction levels of the other 2 and brings disharmony to the team. They might even spread bad cheer in the team and the company due to their disappointment. Imagine how easy your job would be if these 2 left the company of their own accord and you could promote the 1 person while still keeping the morale of the team high. Of course, if you had followed what I mentioned in the previous post, you would not even notice the loss of these two senior members because their juniors would have ramped-up well enough to fill their void.

Similarly at the higher levels of management. All managers cannot hope to become VPs at the same time. Also they cannot expect that the VP will be promoted yearly and they will be in with a chance to become a VP the next year. At this rate, the CEO will have to be changed each month. Higher levels of management are visionaries and they are the key to the longevity and profitability of the company. Care has to be ensured that the correct person reaches these levels, else it will all go bad for the company. Hence it should be ensured, that at each level of experience, the correct people are promoted and the rest are encouraged (not forced or as a measure of desperation, but encouraged) to move on out of the company.

Hence it is very important the a company identifies what should be its Critical Attrition Rate and should seek to keep attrition at those levels in order to maintain a fine balance between operating margin + profitability, and knowledge retention + loss of productivity.

CAR again depends entirely on the growth strategy of the company. If the company is growing aggressively, then CAR should be as less as possible during that period. If the company is a product company, then its CAR should be lesser than if it is a project based company, and so on. Remember, on paper, a higher CAR increases profitability, and a lower CAR increase retained knowledge.

Mathematically, CAR could be defined as the graphical point of intersection of a maximization function on operating margin and a minimization function on measured retention policies.

Choose your CAR wisely

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Imagine a scene where a team is formed, for a project of course, and the team has been together for a few years. The team is now a content and capable team and is running the show quite well. All things cannot be rosy always, and maybe someone need to be promoted (the rest being unhappy), or maybe the company’s profits takes a down turn due to recession. The reasons could be endless, but lets say a few people from the team decide to leave. Such a situation could prove disastrous to the team. What companies don’t seem to understand is that there is no substitute for experience.

Someone who has 4 years of experience in a project (and 4 years total exp), is more valuable than a person with 6 years overall experience and just coming into the team. Experience is a completely different animal and cannot be just replaced. However, this is no to say that you have to try and retain the person who is leaving (as this costs a lot of money and will prove detrimental to the company). In fact quite the opposite, let the person leave, make the environment conducive enough for him to leave. It is not to say that don’t give him hikes and make his life miserable so that he leaves. Treat him well, treat the employee very well and invest enough into him so that he leave the company a better and more knowledgeable person, but he leaves nonetheless.

This way you are not degrading the reputation of the company, but are encouraging more people to join the company for its name (and hence bring in high quality replacements) and also encouraging people to leave the company. You are keeping a healthy talent pool in the company. Think of it as a school or a training institute. You are looking for people to spend their 2-4 years in the company and move out. While in the company, they should be able to add to their resume by learning and working on new things. When they go out, other companies should be willing to take employees from your company without a second thought. Similarly, people from other companies should be ready to join your company without a second thought should there be an opening. This is what reputation does to a company. It lets it keep a talent pool, while at the same time have a rotating staff. (As a corollary, think of what happens in the Australian cricket team. Their A, B and C teams are as strong as their national team)

Such a rotation of staff is very interesting in terms of human behavior as well. One tends to get bored if he is doing the same thing over and over and over again. He needs a change. Encourage him to make the change. A bored person is an unproductive person. A company needs productive staff who enjoy what they are doing and increase the productivity of the company.

Again, the great thing about having such a regular attrition is that new employees come on board regularly and have the time to up skill themselves (this should take a very short time should you have the correct talent) before some senior member decides to move out. This way, the business of the company is not affected due to sudden attrition. The moment someone leaves, a new person can take charge immediately.

Of course, like I said, experience cannot be replaced. Knowledge is the single most important resource a company can have and hence it is very important for a company to retain knowledge. Thorough documentation is mandatory. Before and while writing every single line of code, there should be two lines of documentation written already. Developers should be encouraged to document at all times and it is not the job of a certain other team. Additionally, the company can try to retain (through pay and promotion) certain individuals who show a lot of promise and potential. The company has to groom such individuals. These are the ones that can subsequently grow to lead the company in the future.

The rest can move on and find greener pastures.

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Of course, you had a few languages suited for specific purposes like FORTRAN (for mathematical applications and computations), ADA (supposedly for AI related stuff), Visual Basic (the easiest way to write form based windows applications). And then came along Java. Java was a behemoth back then with its scores of libraries and a completely new way of writing programs and somehow it really didn’t appeal much to me.

If you were a programmer, you had to code in C – that was my staunch belief. And well, C could do almost anything that the other languages could do, but with a little bit more effort – for example Win32 programming instead of easily using VB. However, for all regular programs, C was the best option.

These days however, there are a scores of dozens of programming languages. It is as though each person wanted to stamp his/her name in programming history. Every big shot out there seems to have tried to do a ‘Stroustrup’. Let me see… Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, C#, and a dozen scripting languages. Yet a lot of new languages are being developed – such as Google’s Go is it? Of course some are scripting languages, some are used for web development (some client side and some server side), and a lot many are used for desktop application development. Go into the Linux side of things and you will find GTK, TCL/TK, QT and I don’t know how many more. I may be wrong with respect to a few usages, but you do get the drift.

The problem is many fold. Firstly, I cannot learn a programming language because I don’t know where and if it will be used. Secondly, I cannot program for a problem statement, because I do not know which language to use for that. It’s a vicious loop, the end result being that I am so undecided that spend all the time looking at the first few pages of the books rather than actually spending enough time to learn the language.

Instead, I believe, that the developers could have concentrated on and spent time on building and developing one single language, or maybe two. They could have improved the compiler, or built new functionalities in the form of libraries and so on. The market adoption would have been good and they wouldn’t have unnecessarily put so much confusion into the minds of the poor developers.

As for me, well, I am now confused between which programming language to learn, and which spoken language to learn. Finally, I am not learning anything and I am just burning up my PC monitor and Alt+Tab keys switching windows trying to make up my mind.

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One of the most misunderstood scene from the movie is the whole scene where Cobb and Ariadne go into Cobb’s dream – which is supposedly Limbo and which Saito entered from the Ice level by dying.

The interesting thing here is the huge age difference between Saito and Cobb. If you would have noticed, Cobb actually entered Limbo before Saito – AFAIR. Saito was still protecting the entrance while Cobb and Ariadne went into the 4th level of dreams and it was only later that Saito died after throwing the bomb and stuff, while Eames was planting the bombs on the building.

So, while Saito spent say, 5 minutes protecting the entrance, Cobb and Araidne would have already spent a few hours/weeks in the next level. So, had Cobb stayed on, then he would have been much older than Saito.

The other question here is that Cobb and Araidne went into the 4th level of dreams. Is the 4th level the Limbo level?, since that is where Cobb finds an older Saito somehow. Or while I am writing this, I am thinking that Cobb actually dies in this 4th level, due to the collapsing buildings and then goes to Limbo – where Saito is already present since a long time. But I feel this is unlikely (I had a reason to believe this is unlikely, but have forgotten it since I sat to pen this down).

The reason why the buildings are collapsing in Cobb’s dream is due to the structure collapsing in the Ice level. As we know, the environmental changes in the upper level affects the dream one level below. So since the snow fortress is collapsing, so too are the buildings in Cobb’s dream.

What I feel is that Cobb spends some time with his wife. Meanwhile there is a combined kick due to the buildings collapsing and also the snow fortress collapsing. Simultaneously, the lift stage too would have collapsed since Arthur is out of that dream and the van would have hit the bottom of the lake. Together all this would have delivered a simultaneous kick (a third kick, if you please) and Cobb would have woken up under the lake. As he was swimming to the surface, he would have drowned from being under the water for so long.

Due to this, he now goes into limbo, where Saito has been for very many years already. Also the reason why I believe this is when he reaches limbo, he is washed up on the shore. This relates well to the upper level environment where he is drowning in the lake and hence he is washed onto the shore in the dream. Remember, environment affects the dreams.

Does what I say make any sense or do you disagree?

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The most debated scene in Inception is without a doubt the ending. There are a hundred theories on how the movie ended and then some more. Some have even gone to the extent of saying that the whole movie was someone else’s dream. Some say that the spinning top was the totem of the audience and it was a sign to wake up and so on.

Of course there are the rest of them who are torn between whether the top keeps spinning or whether it topples over. My belief is that it definitely topples over. They clearly show the top losing momentum and shaking a little bit. That much hint is enough for me to believe that the top is ready to topple. For example, imagine a scene where a mad rabid dog is charging at a person and the next scene is blanked out. What could have happened?

An alien spaceship could have mysteriously landed on top of the dog’s head rendering it unconscious. Saint-Gobain could have set up a crystal clear glass front into which the dog would have crashed and the man would be safe. Or, the man might be from the wild wild west and he was waiting for the dog to take its final leap so that he could test his reflex and draw is gun and shoot a bullet through the dog’s open mouth.

Or, the most obviously outcome, without giving too much leeway to one’s imagination, would be that the dog charged and bit the man.

So when the top seemingly shakes, then I figure it is indeed about to topple and I will not read too much into it.

Anyway, regardless of what you thought, that is not the ending. Either option could be right, about the top toppling. How I read this is that, when Cobb sees his kids after such a long time, it does not matter to him anymore whether he is in a dream or not. He is so enthralled that the kids turn towards him, that he loses sight of the top and walks away to be with his kids whom he has missed so much.

So the debate on whether it is reality or not is unfounded here. Cobb has decided to just accept whatever this is as reality and just live in this moment. Maybe that is the lesson that the director intends – enjoy whatever comes your way and make the most of it. Don’t keep judging situations and whether or not it could really be happening. Dreams are anyway something that you cannot depend on, or trust, as seen throughout the movie, so just accept whatever it is that you are experiencing and enjoy it while it lasts.

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All-rightey then, I finally saw the movie Inception yesterday and I too like everyone else have my own theory on what went on in the Movie. Soon I will be blogging about my own theory on what I think actually happened. However, more than trying to figure out what happened in the movie, it is important to understand the various concepts in the movie.

Like a true software developer (I don’t know why this stereotype), I started thinking about it, and maybe because I was thinking about programming too, I found an explanation for the concepts used in Inception in a very programmatical way. Below I have listed the various concepts used in Inception along with its meaning in Inception itself. Then I present to you a simple programming concept and I will explain the concepts of Inception again using this already well known programming concept.

Architect – Someone who designs a dream

Dreamer – A person who is dreaming and whose dream it is. He is trained by the Architect on what he should dream.

co-Dreamers – Also persons who are dreaming, but they are not in their own dream. They are characters in the mind of the Dreamer. A Subject is also a co-Dreamer, but who is not trained by the architect, and hence cannot consciously influence the flow of the dream.

Subconscious – The projections of the Subject (and co-Dreamers) that fills the dream world of the dreamer. These are usually the people in the dream, other than the dreamer himself.

Dream – A state of sub-consciousness where anything and everything can happen.

Kick – Some that will awaken you from your dream and bring you back to reality.

Totem – An object that only you know how it feels, how it behaves and how much it weighs. No one else can replicate this object in their dream, and hence you can find out if you are in someone else’s dream.

Limbo – A state of deepened sub-consciousness that is reached when one dies in a dream level when under a very powerful sedative. In Limbo the person cannot know that he/she is in a dream and hence cannot come out of it unless someone else goes in and tells or proves to that person that he/she is in Limbo.

Now think about the well known and widely used programming concept called OOPS (not in any way related to the Britney Spears song). Just to jog your memory, OOPS is a concept of classes and objects and instantiation and derivation and so on. Lets relate OOPS to the concepts listed above.

Architect – A Program. An program or an application contains all the classes and methods and other definitions that exist. Ultimately whatever will happen, or should happen, is written down in the program.

Similarly, an architect designs the entire dream, including what each dreamer should dream. What every dreamer dreams is what the architect has written down.

Dreamer – A Class. A class is something that defines all the properties and behaviors of itself.

Similarly, a Dreamer defines his dream world and the behavior of all objects in his dream. He brings the subject and the co-dreamers into his dream.

co-Dreamers – A declared Object. This is a declared object or variable that is of some ‘type’. It has to be instantiated to have any meaning. These objects are declared as attributes in a class and will be instantiated when the class, during its runtime, decides to do so. The life of these instantiated objects

Similarly, the co-dreamers are made to enter the dream of the Dreamer and how and when and in what environment they are brought in is based completely on the Dreamer himself.

Subconscious – Callbacks. A callback is a method that an object exposes an another object can call. The callback could be used to send information from one object to another object. An object can pass any sort of information through the callback and the receiving object can use this information to (possibly) modify itself in any way it deems fit.

Similarly, the Subject sends information to the Dreamer through the dreamers callback. This information is what populates the dreamers world.

Dream – An Instantiation. Within a program (or an object), a new object can be instantiated during runtime. This new object has it own properties based on the class(dreamer, co-dreamer, subject) whose type it is.

Similarly, when one or more people go into a dream, they are going into a new world (a new instantiation) that is defined by the dreamer.

Kick – A Destructor. When an object that is instantiated and it doing its own thing has to be brought out of the instantiation, it has to be destroyed. This is done by calling the object’s destructor.

Similarly, a kick destroys the dream of the person and bring him back to the level that the kick was administered in.

Advanced OOPS: The simultaneous kicks can be considered to be a kind of ‘reference counting’.

Totem – Reflection. Reflection is a way by which an object can find out about its own properties during runtime and may or may not modify itself. An object has use only its own reflection property to find out about itself. If it tried to use some other instance’s property, then it will not be able to find out the runtime information about itself.

Similarly, a Totem is something that a dreamer can use to find out about himself and use this information to alter his own state of mind. The dreamer can find out about himself (whether he is in a dream or not) only through his own Totem, and not through other’s representations of what they think is his Totem. Using this information, the dreamer can wake himself up from his dream.

Limbo – A dangling pointer. When an object is deleted(a person is killed in the movie), but the memory referenced by the object is not destroyed, then the referenced memory is in Limbo. The memory is left dangling without any hope of being freed until something else comes and specifically ‘frees’ up this memory – for example a Garbage Collector.

Similarly, Saito was trapped in Limbo (as his body was killed, but his mind was still free), and Cobb had to specifically come down and remind Saito that he was in Limbo and ‘free’ him.

I would love to hear feedback from you about this blog. Also if you think there are some terms that I have not covered, please do let me know and I will think of, and add the OOPS explanations for them too.

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Chinese is a very interesting language which I have heard a lot about. Whenever anyone talks about Chinese, they always talk about the way the words are pronounced. Its not just about the awkward pronunciation, but also that, if it is not pronounced the way it is meant to be, then it not just doesn’t make sense like other languages, but in fact might mean something totally different and something abusive even.

So, Chinese is one language where something has to be spoken the way it has to be spoken. I can’t say that about any other language that I am aware of.

For example, here is one one could do if one speaks with a wrong tone. (Taken from here)

What I realized from this is that non-native Chinese speakers cannot have an accent when they are speaking Chinese. English for example has a South Indian accent, North Indian accent, British accent, West Indian accent, South American accent etc. No matter how funnily the person speaks the world, unless you are not able to comprehend the world in totality, you do understand the meaning of the word.

But by giving such a kind of importance to tonality in the Chinese language, they have effectively made sure that everyone who speak Chinese speak it in the same way (at least make an effort to do so). Thanks to this, I am sure that ever Chinese speaker will be able to understand one another and there will never be an ‘Huh?’ moment due to someone having a funny accent.

Quite cool no?

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Photography is an art, there is no doubt about it.

A photographer needs to have an eye for creating interesting compositions and not everyone is blessed with that. I have mentioned previously also, but some of the best photographs that I have seen until now have come from a basic Canon A-series camera. I have still not come across better composed photos ever. Everyone sees the same scene in all its entirety, but only a good photographer can see what part of that scene will produce the best representation on a film or a photographic sensor. I acknowledge this and that is why I believe photography is an art.

However, where I have a bone to pick is in wildlife photography. Wildlife photography has become a fad nowadays with people buying DSLRs and huge lenses and go out on a whim and shooting birds and animals. I respect those who have painstakingly visited many places and gone into the deepest forests to capture that stunning animal or bird in its own habitat. But then I consider them as a wildlife enthusiast to have gone through all that pain. Previously enthusiasts used to do that to study animals and birds and used to spend a lot of days in their habitat to understand them. These days however, everyone and their kin want to become the next Attenborough of the world and go into forests on a shooting spree without trying to understand these animals.

I wouldn’t call someone who has taken that stunning shot of a tiger or a leopard a great photographer. He was just at the right place at the right time. I believe wildlife photography is a factor of luck and money. Spend 30 straight days in a tiger reserve and you are sure to get some great shots of a tiger. Unless you are really really unlucky, in which case spend 360 days and I can guarantee that you are going to get at least one stunning shot, as no one can every get that unlucky. However, no one is going to pay you to spend your life in a tiger reserve, going on safari’s every morning and evening. It costs money. You bring luck to your side, but blowing away more money going on such trips. Of course that point and shoot camera with 3X zoom isn’t going to win you any accolades. Spend more and get yourself a DSLR with a nice 400mm F/4 lens and your photos will then be appreciated. Have more money, get a camera with a full frame sensor that shoots at 10FPS (to catch the teeth of the tiger sinking into its kill) along with a nice ‘fast’ lens and you are all set to will many wildlife prizes.

Really, wildlife photography is not about talent, but about how to bring luck over to your side. It is less about art and much more about chance. A wildlife photographer must be appreciated for his/her dedication to the task, but in no way does it qualify the talent of a photographer.

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I Beg to Differ.

I have heard this saying so many times in the past that I don’t pay much attention to it. I do accept the fact that Indians behave more civilized when abroad, but I never was able to fathom why not behave like that in India. Well, today morning, when I read the very same statement again, I realized why.

Indians have a flair for hype. Watch any Bollywood movie, where a hero punches a villain and the villain flies off into the distance, and you know for sure the yarn spun into the tale. Indians love ‘masala’, Indians love to show off, Indian love to show themselves off as being different and greater than their friends.

And that stems this change of attitude when abroad.

So, how are Indians introduced to the foreign life? Have you ever had a rich relative from Singapore or Dubai who has told you that there are camera in every street corner? Have they told you that if you make a traffic violation, or if you litter on the streets, then a hidden camera would take your photo and a ticket will appear at your doorstep through mail the very next day? Have they hyped up the very fact that there is zero tolerance for lawless behavior abroad and this has left an indelible fear or doubt in your heart?

Or how about this – have you seen films, where the comedian throws a chewing gum wrapper on the street and is immediately taken in by cops who teleport out of nowhere and beat the chap black and blue leaving him in only his striped underwear?

Such stories and filmy scenes are the ones that tune the mind of the majority of Indians. There are laws in India and abroad, but violation of laws abroad land you in the police net, whereas violation of laws in India are done by heroes, or ones who rough up the police should they interfere. So then, the Indians violate laws back home because they are not afraid of the law, whereas abroad, they sure as hell are. That is how they have been conditioned to think.

And then I have heard of incidents where Indians living in Little India, in Singapore, make a damn mess of the place during their celebration and festivals, probably as a way to sympathize with the living conditions of slum dwellers in Dharavi, Mumbai. When the flock gets together and have numbers on their side, herd mentality sets in.

So, to drive sense into Indians, education is not enough. Strong, strict and harsh policing is necessary. When there is damage to a persons wallet(heavy fines), or to his self-esteem(public humiliation or arrest), then, and only then, is sense driven up into the upper portions of the human body that can assimilate this information.

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