In an earlier blog I had noted that I had lodged three complaints / requests with the Pune Municipal Corporation using their website www.egovpmc.com. The current status is that for 2 complaints the concerned assistant commissioner has asked the administrator to forward the complaint to a different department. The third complaint hasn’t yet been looked at.

Pretty good considering that I wasn’t even expecting these online complaints to ever be read. I appreciate the effort put into creating an e-governance portal for Pune city and I hope it is used widely by citizens and that the adminstration also acts quickly on all complaints.

Often in India you feel hopelessly helpless as regards making any change or improvements to the system or the people. However I have felt that things can change.
For example:
1) Spitting on the roads is a very common and disgraceful practice in India. A few years back, I would have shouted at such people but lately I tell them “Arey mitra ka kartoes asa. Ha aplach rasta ahe na” That is Marathi for (Friend why do you do this? Isn’t this our road?). And the results have been astonishing. Most people feel embarassed about their deed and either give a lame excuse like cough problem or a guilty smile. Never have a got into an argument over this. Although I am sure the person would not have stopped spitting from that time, I am also sure that I have helped him take a small step towards being a better person.

2) Recently I and my family were at Ramoji city in Hyderabad and we came across some 4 or 5 people having icecream and discarding their icecream cups right there, not bothering to use the dustbin. Again I politely asked them if they could use the dustbin just 10 feet away? Surprisingly, all of them had a discussion over this followed by each of them dumping all their garbage in the dustbin.
I am sure if I shouted at them, not only would they have not heard me out, but we would have had a lose-lose situation. I might have got beaten up and they would have not changed.

3) Indian Railways have the largest network on the planet but I do not know why they are so averse to maintaining easy to use dustbins. So throwing all garbage out the window is the rule in India. Even this can change. Whenever we travel , we just hang a garbage bag in our section and ask the people around us to not throw their garbage out but instead use this bag or the dustbin provided in every compartment. Most people would willingly stop throwing garbage out the window.

I am convinced that everybody wants to do the right thing and it’s just circumstances that make people do the wrong things. People can change if you are polite, do not confront them and try o help them instead of scold them.

Just read /saw some excerpts from Aishwarya Rai’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. She is a super ambassador for India and seems to have pulled off a great PR exercise for India.

One notable fact stated on the site is that “The movies made in Bollywood?India’s Hollywood and the film capital of the world?reach more than five billion people worldwide, twice that of Hollywood.”. The Oscars yet claim to award the best movies in the world and completley ignore Indian movies. The sorry part is that Indian producers keep running for recognition from the Oscars as if millions of Indian fans screming and cheering for them isn’t good enough.
Recently the Marathi movie Shwas was in the running for the best foreign film and so was Lagaan earlier. Both were good movies but the hype and drama surrounding their Oscar nominations was unbearable. The Govt. actually contributed lakhs of tax payer money to help them promote the movie.

If the Oscars really are fair awards, I wonder why the producers had to spend 1000s of dollars on introducing the movie to the jury and making them see it. Aren’t judges supposed to view all movies and judge based solely on the merits of the movie?

I never knew that a particular type of numbers have been named after me.

A Harshad number, or Niven number, is an integer that is divisible by the sum of its digits in a given number base. The Niven numbers take their name from Ivan M. Niven from a paper delivered at a conference on number theory in 1997. All numbers between zero and the base number are Harshad numbers. Not that I understood much of this explanation, but it’s cool anyway I haven’t as yet found the reason why these numbers as known as Harshad Numbers. Although my dad is very much a maths and stats person, as these numbers were discovered only in 1997, I can be sure that I wasn’t named after them. So I will presume that it’s the other way around

I have spent most of Sunday trying to be a good citizen of Pune. I wrote to a newspaper about a few issues, I used the Pune Municipal Corporations e-governance site http://www.egovpmc.com to compain / suggest about a few other ones to the governing body and also tracked my earlier suggestion to the state government http://maharashtra.gov.in.

Most developing nations like India are attempting to implement e-governance however there’s still a long way to go. India might have the best IT talent in the world but unfortunately that talent is more available to the west than it is to India. Most govt. sites are rather crude as they are generally created and managed by the B grade of IT in India. Corruption, inefficiency and many other factors contribute to why private companies generally don’t want anything to do with govt. affairs. So it seems that most govt. websites end up either being created and maintained by some inefficient and outdated IT department or by some company that ‘managed’ to get the project. However there are exceptions. The Indian Railways for example is as sarkari’ a body as can be and yet they have a super online train tracking and reservation system at http://indianrail.gov.in. Millions of people use this site everyday and although it doesn’t look good and irritates you with a million popups, it does work well. Things will change as IT slowly trickles down to the millions in India. As of today maybe 2 % of Indians care about computers, internet and such stuff. For the rest food, water and shelter is all that matters. A long way to go, a lot of things to be done.

The title to this entry comes from the movie Finding Nemo. Remember Dory?

I learnt swimming many years ago however I never learnt it properly or was good at it. I could swim about 25 meters. I have been planning to take up swimming training for quite some time but it never quite worked out.

Finally, a few months back, me and my wife, managed to enroll for swimming training at the Tilak Tank in Pune.

It’s now been about 3 months of regular swimming and I can now swim breast stroke about (21 meters x 40) = 840 meters at one go. I am still struggling a little with freestyle as I get exhausted in about 5 rounds. Freestyle is very fast paced and unless you consciously slow down, it is very easy to burn out. There’s no gliding in freestyle and so I end up doing the short sprint equivalent in the water.

My backstroke is ordinary and I haven’t yet tried out the butterfly. Butterfly is considered very difficult and exhausting but it is surely the best stroke to watch.

Swimming is a super sport as it gives you an entire body workout and is great fun. I hope to keep swimming regularly. Let’s see if things do work out that way. Check these links to get started with swimming or if you wish to improve your technique.

The comments to the articles are also useful.

1. FreeStyle: 
2. BreastStroke
3. BackStroke