The Hidden Reflex Blog

One of the more irritating phenomena in Bangalore and I think much of India is that many Indians don’t obey lines or queues. You can be standing in front of a door of an ATM machine and someone will brazenly walk right in front of you as the previous person exits the vestibule.  He or she will pretend not to see you…until you stop them!

While there are often misunderstandings, many many times there has often been no ambiguity when others have tried to come in front of me in a queue:  I’ve generally not allowed anyone to get away with this, chastening them with “peechay hato” (and sometimes an explanation that I was waiting before them) which is a bit on the rude side.  While I try to avoid divisive speech, I think that being direct to the point of a slight rudeness is best.  When I’ve been more on the polite side I’ve heard responses like “no problem”  which translates to ‘I tried to go in front of you but it didn’t work my bad luck’ OR in a tone of magnanimity or slight annoyance “please serve him first” which translates to ‘I am such a great person that I’ll let you go first despite the fact I’m such a superior person I should always be served first.’  Thus I prefer to be a little on the direct side…which I think has surprised many people who’ve probably been getting away with cutting in queues for a long time.  I don’t think they’ll forget quickly and may actually behave differently next time–who knows.

It’s also the job of shopkeepers to manage their shop so that they handle customers in the order they arrive.  One pharmacist, Mr. Murthy I believe, in BTM Layout managed this like an art.  He could remember who arrived with a dozen or more customers waiting.  I was a good customer of his but when I arrived he never served me before others who were waiting–he did, though, always start talking to me, particularly to assure me the order had arrived or not or to make a little small talk.  I felt that was the right way to run a small store–to give attention in small ways to your best customers but to run the store in an organized, professional fashion.  I appreciated it.

It’s in stark contrast to my treatment at MedPlus stores.  Even though I was a pretty good customer (I think?!) of that store, I went there on a Friday and other customers were taken care of before me.  I shouted a bit at the people there who didn’t apologize but lectured me on not having tension which well caused me to shout a bit more on those duffers.  In this case and much of the time in stores, it’s not the other customers’ fault as they just come in and wait.  It’s the shopkeeper who makes some sort of judgment as to what order to serve people.  Amazinging, I went back to the shop on Sunday and the exact same clerk did the exact same thing–started serving other people before me.  I shouted at this guy and a number of other people in the store nodded their head and said that I was correct.  Again, no apology.  I questioned the clerk as to  what was wrong with me?  Was it my caste, my complexion, my hindi (maybe it was that I didn’t speak kannada there or not much kannada at any length–but others speaking Hindi were served before me), my gothra, my face, my body, my clothes, that I”m manglik or not manglik, etc.  The guy was silent though he smiled…and never gave me an answer.  Once I started yelling at him, he got my order together pretty quickly.  I don’t know if I’ll ever go into a MedPlus store again.  Why go somewhere to be treated badly?

I hope that Indian stores and Indians stick to a queue system and respect other people.  Who knows if it will happen in our lifetimes!?

This follows up our earlier post Skin Color and Beauty in Indian Consciousness and Mass Media: Fair=Beautiful. Here are some commercials from Unilever for skin lightening products which couldn’t be more explicit in expressing the idea that Fair=Beautiful. Specifically, these ads tell Indians that you won’t be successful in romantic and other pursuits if you have a dark complexion. These ads (surprisingly to me) star some of the top film stars in India including Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Priyanka Chopra, and Neha Dhupia.

This cultural attitude, the aversion to dark complexions, has serious consequences. Here’s a story reported today on a Bengali housewife who was killed by her husband and in-laws for having a dark complexion (incidentally this sort of story where a young wife is murdered by her in-laws and husband is unfortunately to date common in India not for having a dark complexion but rather for bringing a small dowry). Read the article on the dark complexion motivated murder.

Ponds Ads

Unilever has recently released a series of 4+ ads which form a single short film starring Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan, Priyanka Chopra, and Neha Dhupia to promote their Ponds Cream Product. The basic story of the first ad is that Saif loves Priyanka and Priyanka loves Saif, but Saif leaves Priyanka for Neha because Neha’s skin complexion is lighter. To summarize, even though Saif loves Priyanka a lot, he leaves her for a woman whose only advantage over Priyanka is that she has a fairer complexion.

Here’s the first Pond’s ad from Unilever with Priyanka, Saif and Neha:

Subsequent ads continue the story and have Priyanka use the Pond’s cream product to lighten her skin color. Neha generally is irritable. Saif is torn between the two. We suspect that by the end of the series, Saif will return to the now fair-complexioned Priyanka.

Fair & Lovely Ads

Unilever has used variations of that story for its Fair & Lovely and Fair & Handsome product commercials as well. This is a commercial in Hindi for Fair & Handsome, a skin lightening product for men. The dark complexioned actor is forgotten by the crowd who throngs to a lighter complexioned actor. When he lightens his skin color, he then becomes successful.

This is another Fair & Handsome commercial in Hindi starring one of the most recognizable faces in India, Shah Rukh Khan, who’s likely the most famous Bollywood actor working today. The story is that a guy gets yelled at by his sister for using up her Fair & Lovely cream. Shah Rukh informs him that there’s a Unilever product for men, Fair & Handsome, which he can use to lighten his skin complexion. He uses Fair & Handsome, and his skin (the lyrics promise “become white”) becomes light colored at the end of the commercial which entices a bevy of young women (all fair complexioned) to flock to him.

We had the FUNNIEST technical interview EVER a month or two back on labor day with a candidate we’ll call the Hacker from Mars (THFM).

THFM walks in. He looks normal, wearing casuals. This normal appearance proves to be deceptive as he quickly de-materializes and becomes an amorphous entity bouncing all over our office. THFM never sits down but rather walks from place to place, fidgeting while he walks, often shouting answers from the opposite end of the room to the interviewing developer.

He answers our first technical question, a simple C data structure question, without incident though THFM makes some sinusoidal variations in his speech and a few inscrutable hand gestures while giving the answer which do disturb us. On hearing the second technical question, admittedly slightly complicated, he suggested a few changes to the question itself. When we insisted on answering our question as stated (mainly because we didn’t understand his changes), we were taken back by his retort, “come on boy.” For half or more of our subsequent questions, we’d hear a ‘boy’ variation, “just leave me boy,” “oh boy these people are going to ask me a lot more questions,” or “boy this is the longest interview” peppered with the occasional interjection, “give me google and I’ll give you any answer.” When we asked him to work out an algorithm in pseudocode, he instructed us: “give me a computer and I’ll work wonders.”

For problems THFM couldn’t solve, we gave him hint after hint and ended up basically solving them entirely ourselves. He’d tell us at the end, “I had it with that first hint” or “that works but that’s not at all up to my level.” When we asked him for a solution ‘up to his level’, he told us “if I solve that, I’ll lose my remaining hair.”

For many questions, THFM was kind enough to voluntarily share some great tips such as: “Never use a hash table” because it takes a lot of time for a programmer to write a hashing function. It’s presumably better to jeopardize software performance than to tax the programmer with the task of creating a hash function.

For one problem, he devised an ingenious though utterly unfathomable data structure: a hash table with random keys. To our understanding both key generation and look-up were random–we’ve dubbed this the Clint Eastwood data structure (”are you feeling lucky punk?”) since you’ll have to be pretty lucky to hit the intended data record.

Coming near to the end of the interview we asked THFM to tell us about any outside-of-work programming or technical work he had done. He quickly told us about a new design for computer memory he had invented: no hard drives, no RAM, rather everything in the CPU register. First we asked him how will he store gigabytes of data in the register? He had a pretty straightforward answer: really big registers. We advised him on the danger of lack of persistence–in such a design when you turn the computer off, all register memory is lost and thus you’d have to re-code every program you had stored in the register. So what about this persistent data problem? THFM was unflappable; he quickly suggested the use of solid state devices. We were speechless. Amit decided to test his hardware knowledge.

Amit tried most valiantly to get THFM to solve a circuit problem related to one of THFM’s earlier projects. Every time Amit would make a diagram, THFM would re-route some of the circuits with his pen commenting “there are 1000 possibilities, what about this?” Amit would cross out the re-routed drawing and make a new one but THFM would just as quickly add some new elements and routes. Finally, Amit told THFM, “imagine you don’t have a pen…and you have to solve THIS problem [pointing to his diagram]…” THFM said, “hmmmmm.” After five minutes, we let THFM off the hook and sent him home. He most confidently informed us he had the solution and would revert it back to us (probably he just needed google or a computer?!).

We’re still waiting for an answer.

India is a country of polyglots. The *average* Indian speaks three languages: his or her state language (in Bangalore, the capital of the state of Karnataka, it’s Kannada), Hindi and English. Many Indians speak and or understand several more languages in addition to this. For example, Bharath reads, writes and speaks fluent Hindi, English and Kannada. He also understands and speaks broken Telugu, and understands Konkani, Tulu, and a fair amount of Tamil. Indians are linguistically amongst the most capable around.

Despite these prodigious skills, we do occasionally receive some interesting and amusing resumes. The items are posted as is without making any spelling, capitalization or grammar corrections.

1. Quite impressive accomplishments.

As my résumé demonstrates, I have Turned around big companies like QUANTAS, VODAFONE, TELKOM, NESTLÉ, HAL, FORD with designs for their e-learning projects.

2. Some candidates are quite candid.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths– Adjusting nature, Eloquent, having quick wit, Versatile, Creative, progressive, Oriented to noble professions, punctual

Weaknesses- Sensitive, bit emotional, overwhelming respect for intelligence, not overtly ambitious, gets depressed with small failures

from another resume

Strengths-…I have a tendency of revolting against wrongs

Weaknesses-Temperamental, Over- emotional

from yet another resume

Strong Point : Hard working, Honesty, Good communication

Week Point : Emotional, Family Problems

3. Who doesn’t like an ambitious grand objective?

Objective:

To satisfy my zeal and add to the zest of my life by acquiring a platform from where I can serve by developing interfaces and tools for which I would be remembered forever.

4. Some candidates apparently mistake me for the now-deposed Maharajah Wodeyar. Here’s the introduction from a cover letter:

Dear Sir/ Madam,

Most submissively, I would like to present the following few lines before your esteemed honor….Thanks.

With adoration.

5. Indians have diverse interests. Here are some from several different resumes:

Interests lie in character reading. Numerology forms another interest.

Reading Objectivist literature…

Flair for taking technical trainings.

Hobbies: … Crisis Management.

Keep myself updated with the developments in natural sciences, technologies, humanities and arts to the possible extent, with a keen interest in natural sciences, linguistics, business, economics, psychology, sociology and current events.

Real-time thinker

Hobbies : …Playing

Hobbies : Designing Logos, Watching Cartoons, Long Drives,

6. The Brain Machine is available during school vacation…

… It would be my privilege to associate and work in your organization. I sincerely
believe in myself, my abilities and my brain machine. I am looking
for an opening to not only to gather work experience but allow my brain
machine an outlet to churn out ideas unlimited. My target sectors are
Advt./ Events dept../ Communications/ Brand/ Media. My vacation is on
till end of May 08 only. …

7. If there was a “cheak (cheek?) and mate” feature in chess, I think chess would be a far more popular and widely played game.

Minor: CHESS GAME

Duration: 45 days

Team member: 3

Description: we made CHESS GAME in VIth semester as a minor project using only C with some graphics feature. It was run through keyboard not with mouse. cheak and mate condition is a future enhancement of this project.

8. Here are some sentences with typos or poor word choice that have some funny results…

The software also helps marinating the schemes and the scheme rates accordingly.

It was with great interest that I read your recent posting in the xxxxxxxxx newspaper for the position of xxxxxxx.

I hereby make an application for a position in your company. My prime motivation is to exercise accumulative abilities to the fullest extent.

I will be much leased To be an excellent Electrical and Electronics professional…

Having a flair for writing with good communication skills and inquisition in learning new technologies

provide me an opportunity to work in an Internationally competent ambience like yours

Since it is confidential Product I don’t want to describe it here, I will discuss the things Only in words.

Some brain-trust put this last line together as I’ve encountered it in several resumes

I shall try my utmost to prove my worth and talent,accomplishing the
sole aim of an asset.

8. Sometimes when you’re too lazy to customize each cover letter (to say how you found out about a job opening in this case), a generic line can come off as creepy.

I have come to know through some reliable sources that you have a vacancy [position] for fresher.

9. An absolutely, brilliant security tip from Google’s Orkut service (massively popular in India so I thought I’d put it in here):

Orkut Security tip: Protect your account: Never share your username and password with anyone.

10. I can’t remember ever reading another resume with a life motto in it, but based on this one, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have one:

Motto in life: After I have given my best I should await the result in peace.

Usman Latif from Pakistan doesn’t write on his personal website/blog very often, but when he does, it’s usually pretty stimulating.

Most recently, he makes a compelling case that Microsoft had no real intention of acquiring Yahoo with its recent offer (which Yang and others claim), but rather wanted to drive Yahoo into corporate raiders’ hands to get a new management team more Microsoft-friendly and particularly ready to negotiate a better deal on a pay-per-click advertising patent Yahoo owns (patent ‘361).

Read Usman’s full analysis.

If you like this article, check out some of Usman’s others particularly his earlier post on patent ‘361.

Virgin Tissues? Not just Virgin Tissues but World Class Virgin Tissues. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to indicate but it sounds pretty good?! Actually, to think that there are non-virgin tissues out there is really, really scary. More funny designs and copy from Indian products to come. By the way, that typo “nett” sounds like a good name for a web 2.0 site (maybe it’s not a typo, maybe the extra t stands for something?). By the way, for those of you in the market for t.p. in India, these tissues I can avow from personal experience are indeed as soft as “kotton” even though they are a paper product.