Month: May 2008

Am I happy to be sad?

Posted on by Rayan

It is nice to be genuinely happy. But it is the salad-without-dressing variety kind of happiness that is suspect. I am against happiness gurus who implore people to fake happiness in the hope of finding happiness. The gurus think that something is drastically wrong with you if you are not happy. Their case is that if you are not delirious with joy every minute, you should see a therapist. You pursue happiness when you are sad, or why else would you run after it. I am glad Newsweek published an excellent article in support of sadness.


iStock_000004960822XSmall.jpg If it matters to someone who is desperate to be happy, may I remind them that the genius Charlie Chaplin, who made everyone laugh, had passed through many melancholic moments in his personal life. Though many were of his own making, there could be little doubt his strokes of genius would have been conceptualized in those private moments. I can cite his film Modern Times (1936) as a good example. Isn’t it amazing that it reflects our times as well as it did in his days? He couldn’t have been happy all the time and portray sadness just for the movies.

In our moment of loss this quote from Eckart Tolle (in his famous book ‘The Power of Now’) should come in handy, “Accept it as if you have chosen it”. There is no other sensible way to handle the loss. It is ridiculous to put up a brave, but fake smile on one’s face denying the loss.

Emerson’s railway bonds crashed in the panic of 1857, and he wrote about it only once. Similarly when his house burned down, he recorded it just once: House burned. Though Emerson wrote about his losses only once, at least he acknowledged it.

My conviction is that if we admit our sadness, we come to terms with ourselves . Our quiet acceptance leads to some serious introspection that eventually may or may not lead us out of our current state of gloom. But either way it doesn’t matter. In such private moments we ask ourselves many silly, irrelevant questions, out of which one pertinent answer may emerge that would solve one of our eluding problems.


For those who chase happiness at all costs, running away from sadness; may I quote my guru Al Koran, “You cannot pursue happiness. You cannot arrange to be happy. Happiness is something that fills the moment and it comes upon you unawares …..”

Couldn’t agree any more with that. Can you?

Let me take a picture of that

Posted on by Rayan

Remember the movie Superbad where Jonah Hill (Seth in the movie) was compromised and captured with the stain on his thigh. Though it was fictional it reminds us that we are under surveillance wherever we go. A camera phone did the damage.

I use my cell phone for one and only purpose: i.e. to make and receive calls, though it has many bells and whistles. To be frank with you, even to this day, I don’t know all the features offered in my two year old cell phone. Just when I thought I am becoming dumb in this techno savvy world, I read this article from Telegraph / UK where it states an over reliance on technology makes our society dumb and dumber.

Though personally it comforts me, I may not agree with its findings. For the simple reason gadget hungry consumers are fast to assimilate information though their critical thinking ability may become a casualty in their pursuit. They look for patterns and differences between their current and new tech toys and are soon at home with their new ones. They can’t be faulted too much. Because today it matters little what you know already, compared to how fast you can learn.

I can expect that you opened your new cell phone package right in the shopping mall where you bought it. Removed the battery, assembled the SIM card & battery while simultaneously telling your friend as to what you are up to with your old cell phone. You can’t wait to get home to put it on charge. While on charge, you try to transfer songs, address book to your new blue tooth enabled device. And you go crazy clicking with your cell phone camera whatever comes into your view.

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This blog is just about your last activity. While it empowers you to click on anything you fancy and keep the image for posterity, I think we should use some discretion before doing so. I vividly remember the day I saw the Air France A340 airliner (Flight 358 from Paris) overshooting the runaway at Pearson International Airport because I was driving beside the runway on Highway 401 just at that moment. I remembered many guys getting off their cars, running towards the fence to take a close look at the accident and some furiously taking pictures with their camera enabled cell phones.

May be they want to share their curiosity with their friends and family members or put it on YouTube. While the merit of such actions is debatable, I definitely am not for capturing human misery or misfortune on camera. While it may be fun for us to capture someone in a compromised position in our cell phone camera, it is a permanent embarrassment for the victim on camera.

If we are on the other side of the camera, it may not always be possible to restrain a shutterbug, in capturing us in an embarrassing situation. For we don’t know on whose cross wires we are on at any moment. When in public we should not let our guard down, but act civil at all times. Lest we may find ourselves on YouTube.

Off-the-shelf or made-to-order

Posted on by Rayan

Would it be wise to buy a laptop off the shelf or build one to your specifications? There are vendors who offer products in either one or the other or both ways to buy. I think it merits some thought as to which is more advantageous to you, as a buyer.

For instance vendors like ACER, Toshiba, HP offer laptops that are pre-configured and hence available off the shelf. While Dell, Lenovo, Alienware offer base laptops that are pre-built as well as ship custom-built units that are fully customizable. There are also some lesser known brands that offer purely made-to-order laptops.

Hardcore game enthusiasts (who have unlimited budget and time on their hands) may willingly advance their hard earned cash to such companies like Alienware and wait patiently for the arrival of their technological wonders. They would stop at nothing to gain, even a small edge that technology can offer, over other players (enemies?) in an online war. They may have justifications for such extreme behaviour.

Barring such cases, my question is addressed to the rest of us who buy laptops for day-to-day computing (i.e.for business, pleasure and even gaming). I think it is not hard to find pre-configured laptops from brandname vendors that would well meet our requirements .

So what advantages are there for the buyer in user-configured laptops that are made to order?

1. There is a perceived choice offered by the vendor.
2. User configured laptops can be more powerful with advanced features not available currently in the market.

These advantages are illusory in my opinion for several reasons:

  • You can always find pre-built laptops that comes close to if not exactly match those made-to-order laptops.
  • Often most of us are not power users who stretch the laptops to the maximum while using. So a laptop almost always is under utilized.
  • Useful life of a laptop (pre-built or user configured) is a maximum of three years and soon there will be laptops coming into the market that exceed those carefully configured laptops. So there is little sense to configure a system online and wait for its arrival only to find it to become obsolete soon.

While it is not advantageous to the buyer, it is every bit advantageous to the vendor who offer custom built laptops for the following reasons:

  • Vendors get the entire order amount instantly as deposit through anyone of their payment options – viz. credit card, Paypal, wire transfer, money order. Even in their ‘buy now and pay later financing offer’ they might get their invoice amount fully from the financial institution that pickup the tab. Interest gained from such deposits is pure profit though they may have only two to three weeks to deliver the promised order
  • For the vendors there is the certainty of the order and hence can plan their production well. Inventory carrying costs is very much reduced.
  • Because of this certainty they have less need to offer incentives to the push an otherwise pre-built, perishable (yes, laptops are perishable!) product along the line: Distributor -> Wholesaler -> Retailer -> End user
  • While they may collect interest on such deposits, they have no need to raise working capital and hence save interest on it. If my memory serves me well, there was a time when Dell was so flush with cash it had negative working capital requirement. In this respect it is even better than the restaurant business which enjoys credit from its supplier while the customer pays cash and carries the benefit immediately

While these and other advantages offer a lot of savings for the vendor, will the vendor be willing to share a slice of the pie with the customer?

To you as a potential buyer, my advice would be to think if there are any real advantages to order a user-configured system and if so negotiate with the vendor to pass on some his benefits.

Listen to your heart

Posted on by Rayan

How often have we heard someone say, “Listen to your heart son, you’ll be OK”. I think that advice may mean that one should listen to one’s intuition or the voice of the soul in any situation, where a decision is required. Majority of us take this route (including myself) when we take decisions, even important ones.

May be we think, if we listen to the voice of the soul and not the head, it is morally right. We think that showing empathy to your opponent is the right thing to do. We comfort ourselves that it will reward us financially too in the long run (because we are empathetic?). Or we presume that we are wicked or selfish or seen as being a manipulative person if we pay heed to our head in negotiating a deal. Or is it plain laziness that we don’t do our homework before negotiating a deal?


Later we justify that our decision was based on what our heart said at the exact moment we signed the deal. It couldn’t have been any other way. We feel comfortable with that deal until someone points out that they got the same deal on much more favorable terms. As a buyer, as well as seller of goods and services, I can relate to this discussion in a meaningful way. Let me give you one example from personal experience as a buyer.

Last year I helped my son, buy a cell phone with cool features from a dealer with the services being provided by a leading service provider. You bet, we did our homework before finalizing the deal. We looked at several cell phones from different manufacturers (in terms of features and specifications), read user reviews of many and finally narrowed it down to just the one that we are interested in. Similarly we listened to many existing users of the service provider and its competitors before deciding to go with the one we chose. We also noted down the standard monthly fees charged by the service provider for a set of calling features we are interested in. Finally we decided to go ahead with this particular dealer for the cell phone as well as the service because he offered a monthly fee that was below the market rate.

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So far so good. Our heads ruled our decision. But our hearts took over when the dealer said that, while our monthly fees would not change if we sign a two year or three year contract, it would greatly help him gain a concession from the service provider if we signed a three year contract. Will we do him the favor? Apparently it was a guileless request. For a moment, we felt powerful and the dealer was at our mercy.

What did we do? Of course we obliged.
Our justification:

  • My son is going to be in the same city for at least another three years
  • While it is not costing us extra, we get an opportunity to help another person.

But remember in “helping” this person we inadvertently extended the time horizon of the deal. Within the last one year of the three-year contract, so many changes can happen that may turn out to be favorable to us, the customers. We have no way of knowing those at the time we agree.

But for the dealer (as well as the service provider) it is definitely a better deal. Both have a better time view of the time horizon. They know their business. While we are only one of many customers to them, for another three years we are not shopping for another contract! The dealer knows how to pitch and must have practiced and perfected it as an art with very many customers (victims) before meeting us. For sure the service provider is rewarded with a steady payment for one extra year, and the dealer could have been rewarded instantly with some cash bonus.

Even if things remain the same, in hindsight I feel I should have been smart enough to restrict ourselves to a two-year contract and negotiate a better deal at the end of the contract period. Why not? After all we have proved ourselves to be loyal to them and we are going back to them for a repeat business.


Suppose we decide to sign the three-year contract anyway at least we should have gained a concession or two in agreeing for a three-year contract for it matters little to us to whether it is a two or three year contract. Looks like it was not a win-win situation. All because we let our heart rule.

My line of thinking is supported by a recent article in the Economist titled ‘Inside a deal’. I recommend you to read it, think it over and let me know your feedback.