Looking for underwriters.

Invitation strictly for all those individuals who are born investors but never got an opportunity to invest in short term and long term tailored money instruments.

I have certain equation to execute and proposition to equate. I’m looking for underwriters who guarantee financial obligation which surfaced during the course of acquiring an asset. Nature and type of asset I’m not disclosing now, but for hypothesis and understanding I will consider Yacht (a recreational or sailing boat) as the asset.

Intention of taking Yacht as an example being that I strongly believe that “Sail not the wind decide the way we go”

Equations at this level being

Global Indicators: Globally it is felt that financial equations will smoothen in coming years as there is no room left for further deterioration.

National Indicators: Interest rate will dilute and economy will revive.

General Sentiments: People will invest in appreciating assets as during the economy revival the big ticket items appreciate at a faster rate. Example large cap vs. / small caps stocks.

I have a commitment to buy an asset with a base price of 2.4 million to which there is attached additional attached of 10%, which contributes to cost of acquiring the asset, holding, creating and maintenance. The total final cost of Yacht comes down to 2.65 million, of which payments of .4 million has been already made. Remaining amount has to be settled in one go or in parts.

During last one year this asset has appreciated by 26% and the base price stands to be 3 million as per current market valuation. As the asset is appreciating I’m happy with the returns but at the same time don’t want to stop here and wait till this investment has fully ripen and yield returns; instead I want to diversify myself in multiple such assets backed up by underwriters as I believe that resources are limited and If one wants to trade in multiple assets without backups it becomes close to impossible.

The equation is that I convert my asset valued at base price of 24 million to shares of face value 10 INR, held privately among the partners. As the shares are privately held and are in physical format they can be traded within the partners, they can be also traded with future partners and investors but can’t be traded on the bourses.

Anyone purchasing shares at the face value has the profit of 25% at the very first day as the current valuation of the assets emerges to 3 million, though the market valuation is governed by various external factors but all the factors inclusively adds to the valuation of the asset.

Everyone have the exclusive right to sell but promoter posses selective rights to buy and exclusive rights to recall. In case promoter is approached by a buyer who agrees to buy the entire shares, the shares will be recalled from other buyers and profit will be shared based on the share holding pattern.

Does it sounds interesting, please contact me for further details.
Image source: mubasher.info

Price purchase parity.

I’ve been in Chennai for almost a week and shuttled daily between hotel where I had put up to Tidel Park for some official assignments. The only option which proved easy and convenient most of the time for commuting was auto rickshaw; rickshaws in Chennai hard nut to crack.

No other city In India have earned more accolades and fame than Chennai as far as Auto rickshaw are concerned, Really they are world famous in India.. hahha… all because of the customer experiences and the unrealistic fares they charge. But my experiences with the auto drivers were different; the most of guys with whom I transacted appeared to be genuine and charging realistic figure, I met some rotten apple as well, but those case should not be taken as a base for forming a perception and treating everyone like that.

It also happened that when we were riding a Rick it was about to get out of fuel and the driver sought our permission to drive towards the fuelling station. As most of the Ricks had LPG written on the front panel I though he will fuel LPG or CNG, but to my surprise he asked the auto to be fuelled for petrol.

Reasons for high fares Bubbled, as to why they are charging more fare as compared to fares in other cities. In most of the metros public transport uses CNG which cost max 35-42 INR/ kg and a vehicle like rickshaw answers 16-18 miles to one kg whereas the petrol cost at least 70 INR to a litre; the calculation is pretty simple they are operating at double to cost of CNG .

I really felt sympathy with those guys; they got defamed without any reason. High cost of living would have really pushed them to corner and they might be facing difficulties in making booth ends meet.

If there is price purchase parity then that has to be compensated by none other than high fares and that’s what they are doing and I personally don’t feel anything wrong in that.

After all taking a ride on an elephant would cost you proportionately. I feel if this condition persist, auto-drivers in Chennai would have a card swiping machine installed facilitating the customers with a swipe and a smile..:)

Image source: aartikrishnakumar.com

Chennai Times

I have never visited southern India, but have read and heard a lot through my colleagues and known associates, to me; prima facie it appeared to be a different country within the country. A lot of told-untold stories regarding compatibility of food, language, lifestyle, cultural, people and specially the cabs drivers and the way they charge.

Destiny gave me a chance to visit Chennai the happening city of Tamilnadu, city blessed with rich heritage and cultural values, boasting on longest and beautiful beaches. I and my colleagues happened to visit Chennai for some official purpose. When we were about to land the city I can sense that the stay is not going to be comfortable at the city, the sky appeared very cloudy and a cyclone hitting the eastern part of India few days back created some unrest in the atmosphere.

We landed at Kamraj Airport; the airport didn’t appeared as a treat to eyes, there was a lot of restructuring happening and I personally felt that much work is needed to make it more presentable to the audience. After getting out of the terminal we were roaming around in search of a prepaid taxi counter, and after a small search we were able to locate one, when we were looking for the prepaid counter a lot of people wanted to understand where we wanted to go… to my surprise they can speak English fluently, there command over English was better than few of the white collared executive I have interacted.

Anyways this was the second surprise, we got loaded in a Cab, but here the driver didn’t understand any language other than the local language, it went difficult for us to make him understand where we wanted to go exactly. We gave him the counter slip which we got from prepaid counter and he drove us the way. The guy appeared to be genuine and decent. During the course I tried to interact with him but he preferred to keep mum; language barrier... :)

After finishing off with our jobs we wanted to go back to our hotel and were looking for an auto rickshaw, I remembered a learning which I had through my own reading experience, it suggests pay only 70% of the fare asked for especially if you are in Chennai, With this learning we managed to strike a deal with the rickshaw and reached the hotel.

Annsun Botique Hotel, located in the heart of city; ambiance and room was very good and I found it a very good and convenient option for business travellers. The hotel owned by a gentleman named as “Sundar” (meaning “beautiful”) and it seems that he has nicely crafted everything for his establishment. We had our supper; it appreared to be a fusion of North and South recipes having a gentle touch of south preparation and spices.

After having yummy dinner we had a small walk in the nearby lanes and called off the day as we had many challenges waiting for us the next day.

Image source: tamilnadu.ellamey.com

Streching the limits

It’s an old adage that in rough time nothing favors you and all news reaching to you is "bad news"; I was also facing rough times since the start of this financial year after few of my key resources from application development and maintenance decided to part away. Though at ground level there was a lot of action and restructuring happening at the technology front; newer resources were getting aligned, but it didn’t bought cheer to the colleagues who had decided to part away.

I was working on an important assignment of restructuring the physical hardware infrastructure and delivery model. My core skills being into applications, development and program management with little exposure to the infrastructure, I was thrilled with the new assignment, but on the contrary the network team felt nerves, as most of the infrastructure was moving towards managed services and they can sense a threat to their job, sensing the smoke of uncertainty they decided to part away.

This was like a double whammy for me as I was already struggling with regular development, maintenance and management task on top of it the infrastructure management team started shirking. At given point of time I appeared too much occupied with multiple types of responsibilities that too without having enough resources to answer the never ending dynamic requirements and challenges of typical IT setup.

I was bit worried and alone to understand the criticality of resources or to respond to contingent situations; it was getting difficult for me to answer all requirements, there were multiple challenges at every level and to me it appeared as if I’m fighting the lone battle. At times I appeared like an enterprise in myself, an institution which has knowledge and understanding of all the happenings in the vicinity.

But one can’t think of running the organization with this proposition, building in-house capacity or getting resources on an immediate basis was difficult. I explored an idea with my former colleagues and known associates of outsourcing certain activities which were not our core business.

The advantages of outsourcing started getting reflected, we could manage two independent consultants in less than half of the cost of a dedicated resource also with a high availability of 24X7. There are recruitment errors and so were some errors in vendor selection as well, a handful assignment with the consultants didn’t worked well and they were not able to provide solutions for some of our requirements.

But those were only one of the few cases and can be ignored. But the lesson learned is that the operations should be process driven and not person driven, with the lesson I started building In-house capabilities and capacities, though it will take some time to get fine tune and responding the requirements, but sooner or later they will take over the charge of consultants. I’m also happy with the newer dimensions getting added to the existing team as they are getting opportunity to work on different assignments.

Images source: chornyruns.blogspot.com

Unlocking the Mentality

Mindset doesn’t change and yeah it’s very difficult to change. Mindsets are basic instincts, a long drawn process formed by sedimentation of layers the way we had perceived things in our past. One and all interchangeably used mindset, mentality or a perception are governed by our upbringing, the social, political and economical environment and is a part of our DNA. In most of cases upbringing of Kids in Indian society is under strict vigil of parents, grandparents and relatives, our upbringing methodology doesn’t encourage kids to be courageous, fearless and risk takers but sometimes molest their entities. In general context we perceive a very cautious approach for the kids, we warn them repeatedly to be cautious in whatever they do and from the very beginning we start transforming them to fearful and risk aversive individuals.

The same mindset and approaches we try to put in every task we pursue and in most of the causes we tend to more reserve and cautious then what’s really required. Basic instinct of insecurity and fear of oneself getting challenges, consequences and questions in future never leaves us; we always want to carry proofs of the past and security for the future.

I could see the primitive mindset in real action in one of my assignment wherein I was working on email application which hosted some hundred odd users. Typically we don’t abort things which are unused or have lost the context, even our houses are filled up with objects which are obsolete and might be never put into the use still we carry those things with us for years and preserve them with a possibility of future use. Household items are repaired many times even if the cost of repairs surpassing the cost of newer one just because we have emotional bonding to them, we feel everything close to our heart and believe all objects are elements of our identity.

I could see thousands of mails which had lost the context and value preserved in the mail boxes. Questions regarding the usability of those email which were generally reports and archived documents got a uniform answer “I may be asked for the report and status quo for that reason I want them to preserve”. Mail box size ran into Gigabytes and it appeared next to impossible for me to work with the giant mail boxes and bulky mail items.

After a hard time convincing the mail box owners agreed to get rid of those items but I could see the fear and insecurity that they were foreseeing with future requirement. Future equation which may or may not happen and may be different than what we perceive but still we wanted to prepare for future and carry the proof of our past because we fearful, threatened and uncertain.

Mindset hardly change and it’s difficult to change

Image source: adamsprackling.com

Turnkey Project

Till recent past our requirements and technical support for IT infrastructure was answered by a local service provider and partially by in house team and we as an organization were satisfied to have 99% uptime of our services, which was collectively maintained and managed by our service provider and in-house team.

After the downturn we as an organization were hit by inflationary cost of resources and services that our service provider use to render. My hunt for advanced and cost effective solution was on and with a little bit of restructuring happening at the top level certain decisions and directions got rephrased. I got a bit of liberty to implement decisions which was for the betterment of the organization and were long term.

The idea of shifting the infrastructure resurface in March this year and I started working on the scope, though I were not fully aware of the nitty-gritty of the transition and neither I detailed it in depth but was doubly sure that the project was going to be different and difficult challenge of its own kind.

My observation and consideration that the project is going to be tricky because of the fact that we been working with certain setup and applications from last 11 years and were at great ease, customizing and reconfiguring most of the things as per the needs. To plugging out things which were up and running from almost a decade and plugging it to a different location and architecture was an uphill task.

Till some point of time it was a thought only to move to a professional data centre, colloborate with some organization which can offer better service, stability and uptime. Aspirations started building stronger with each passing day and Thoughts rolled out on paper and started getting the desired base and shape; I started formulating it in a form of project and started working on it.

With each discussion and advancement in planning stage, I observed some kind of instability in the network and server administration team who were managing the existing setup. I could make out that they were feeling insecure and they themselves were going to be obsolete in the organization once the project is fully implemented.

Things generally happen the other way one thinks of, and same happened with me, some of the key members who were important for the implementation of project left. But this movement didn’t deter me as I was confident of getting the project implement no matter what comes.

Today as most of the things are aligned as per the plans, I really boast on achieving the objectives without anyone’s support, But the funniest part is that I’m alone to understand , compliment and congratulate myself, as there are very few individuals in the organization who understands the complicacies and challenges. But no worries the learning are adding values to my skill set and me happy with that.

Image source: psasystems.com

Looking Ahead

It has been almost four months I have not faced the book I mean facebook, neither wrote anything and nor twitted. I’m feeling immense satisfaction while narrating my experiences after so many days. It’s not that nothing happened in life in between, in fact a lot of things happened @ personal, professional and national level, a lot of external factors changed during recent past which triggered me many time to write, but the responsibilities to which I was answerable dragged me to my core business line. My business is not writing, IT/ IT Enabled services, Infrastructure, application and database are the bread winner for me and my family.

Last many months kept me busy with migration of my organizations IT infrastructure from current location to a distinct location. I traversed the whole cycle of plan do check and act many a times, similarly internals, external, economical, political and financials factors traversed a whole cycle globally as well as locally.

Many things prompted me to write but I simple couldn’t afford to do, global finance equation traversed like a sine wave starting from Europe threatening Asia and propagating to US. It calmed down many a times but again reinitiated. Politically lots of things kept the world buzzing, kings were overthrown, and countries joined hands and parted as well. India kept on moving with lot of burning issues 2G, 3G, corruption and what not.

Globally, nationally, politically things are back to square one as if we have not moved a bit even, scenarios are same as they were a few months ago. But personally I learned and experienced a lot of things during the course of migration. Each day proved to be learning experience, Googled the queries, answered lot of challenges, adopted and implemented a lot of good practices whereas discarded older approaches and viewpoints.

As there were a lot of process and approaches which were person oriented, resource intensive and manual were bound to change with new infrastructure in place I encountered a lot of resilience from my colleagues. People are generally rigid and don’t want a change, but as this change was for the betterment of the organization and a bigger picture appeared profitable to the organization, individual interest was to be sacrificed.

As a learning from project management practices, any person, object or entity who has direct or indirect interest with the project becomes the stakeholder in the project. Colleagues who were habitual of certain practices and were working in a comfort zone were reluctant to change and could have adversely deviated or impacted the planned project scope, but as these resistance areas and objects were known I was able to win confidence of major stake holder who was interested in betterment of the systems and practices.

Now as most of the problem areas are solved and implementation is half way through I’m bit relaxed and look forward for a more stable, robust and better future of the organization… Aamin

Image source: www.psdgraphics.com