Ravi’s Blog

Hyderabad and Indian RealEstate has been feeling blue for the past year. This global downturn has affected not only the capital markets but real estate. After holding the prices steady for the past year, it seems that sellers are caving in.
I have been in touch with some real estate agents in hyderabad and they are saying how tough the market got.
Bharat Iconia has apparently reduced their pricing by 30% from the prices mentioned on their website. You can now get units in the iconia towers for Rs 3000/sqft. Emmar-MGF slashed prices by Rs800/-
Word is that land prices around hyderabad have moderated as well. If you know of any concrete reductions in prices, post them in comments.

I posted about aamir khan blog couple of months back. At that time his blog was on lagaandvd.com. Since that time he moved his blog over to AamirKhan.com. Strangely, he ends his old blog without any reference to plans of moving over to new site. It took me by surprise, but i found his new blog.

About 2 weeks back, i discovered Aamir khan’s blog. Yes, - the bollywood star - Aamir khan. Surprisingly, i found his blog to be a good read. He reacts to the 100s of comments, delves into his thought process for some characters and blogs. Atleast for now, he’s posting regularly, talking about his upcoming movie (hindi version of Ghajini) and things going on.

This article on ibnlive talks about how india is losing it’s shine as an outsourcing partner. There are several reasons highlighted by the report.

This doesn’t come as a surprise for people familiar close to the outsourcing business. Since early last year, a lot of the entrepreneurs i met made comments about how working with india was becoming un-economical. Friends in cisco, yahoo, hp all talk about how the companies are finding the hiring difficult, costs escalating and quality diminishing.

This is to be expected. Internet is a great equalizer. There is no reason why talented indian engineers should expect less pay than talented american engineers.

If you are running an outsourcing organization and want to stay competitive - here are few tips for you. All three of these are interrelated and you have to be really good at all the three.

• Quality.Focus on producing high quality implementations. Spend a good bit of time doing design, identify potential issues, discuss the specs and provide alternatives. One complaint i heard over and over from different people, is that developers don’t ask questions. They just develop it, and the thing invariably looks bad or fails. This includes situations where specs/mocks don’t address all cases. simple example, they may have designed a mock for a situation when user has rated an item, but no situation when user hasn’t rated yet etc.
• Communicate.Communicate status in a detailed fashion. Over communication is not a bad thing. It helps a lot especially when people can’t see face to face. People expect that as you develop, build a product things come up. It’s great if you can find a solution, but more often than not, you might have refer back to a ui designer, product manager and/or engineering manager. Take 10-15 mins at the end of every day (or when you finish a task) to write up what you did, any open issues, any help you need. Nothing irks a product/eng person more to receive a email saying ‘it’s done’ and then go look at the product to see that’s clearly not good enough to call “done”. “done” to you might mean that you did what was asked of you. Put yourself in the user’s seat to see if this is really ready.
• Timezone.All of us would like to have normal lives. Work during the day, catch a tv show in the evening, spend time with family. Working all nights is not healthy over longer periods of time and even though you make more money, it’s poorer quality of life. That said, make sure you can give atleast few overlapping hours a day with your product team that’s giving you the project. Especially, when you send the status, questions etc, wait till that person gets online and see if they can catch you. You can be available to get online late night to connect if they call you on phone. This will save time and avoid having to wait 12 hours to get a response and helps make the whole development move faster. People leading the project will immensely appreciate this.

To do these effectively, you need to have people working for your company for good periods of time (2 years atleast). It’s hard to do the above 3 cost-effectively, if your development team is churning over every 6 months. All companies are in a competitive, fast growing industry that is growing fast and they are all working hard to grow quickly, gain more business, meet needs of their customers.

Remember, if you expand by dropping your quality, you’ll damage your reputation and loose customers. Instead, if you miss couple of growth opportunities but keep the quality, you’ll retain your customers, grow more modestly, build a stronger company and have the opportunity to charge appropriately for your quality. Set a high bar for people to make it into your company, reward them well and hold them to high expectations.

Every few years, this seems to be something that all the movie fans across india go through. One more movie - beloved to the nation of a billion people or atleast has succeeded in engaging their attention - gets proposed for the best foreign film award in academy awards. Of course, more often than not, it does not even win a final nomination.

Since 1929 (when academy awards started) only 3 indian movies were nominated to Best Foreign Film. They are Mother India (1957), Salaam Bombay (1988) and Lagaan (2002). I wasn’t around when Mother India was made. Salaam Bombay was not a mainstream movie in india. It’s a really good movie, but i doubt if majority of movie-goers in india watched it. Lagaan is one movie that captured nation’s attention and won their hearts over.

Except those 3, none of the 1000s of other movies that were made in india even qualified for a nomination. To me personally, that is quite shocking. Ok, some of the popular movies are plagiarised. A lot of them are no more than formulaic movies filling in the neccessary ‘masala’ and keeping the movie entertaining updated to newer times. However, there are quite few gems, which engage the viewers and a lot of the movie viewers connect with them on several levels.

Even with my limited knowledge of indian cinema, I can think of quite a few hindi & telugu movies that should be strong contenders for best foreign film. SwatiMutyam (telugu), Parinda (hindi), Paheli (hindi), Sankarabharanam (telugu), Nayagan (Tamil), Rudaali (Hindi), Hey Ram (Hindi), Devdas (hindi). If you know any more movies or can think of some, post them in comments.

In 2006, there are atleast 2 films which have engaged in indians. Rang De Basanti connected with the nation’s idealistic youth, while Lage Raho MunnaBhai beautifully combined comedy with core message from the father of the nation. Lage Raho Munnabhai has revived social activism based on true gandhian idealogy. “Gandhigiri” is in vogue. Perhaps more young people learned about some core gandhian principles from this movie than through their text books which provide statistics and deify Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Rang De Basanti connected with nation’s youth, glorified violent action as a solution to decayed, corrupt political & governmental structure. In this it is a polar opposite to Lage Raho Munnabhai. It glorifies freedom fighters who chose to kill instead of love their enemy.

Surprisingly, both these movies were probably the biggest grossers in 2006. As to what a cinema can hope to do -at the boxoffice & socially- they have done all those and beyond.

Sadly, both of them did not make the cut. A nation perplexed - and somewhat offended - started wondering if oscars are even relavant to them. I was in hyderabad, listening to the radio stations when the final nominees were announced. This seemed to be a sensitive issue to be discussed everywhere. Of course, most of the people on the calls said that it’s not important to be nominated for academy award and we shouldn’t care. Newspaper experts wrote about this and said the same. “who needs the oscars?”, “we don’t care”

Yet, We Do.

I suppose the academy will never ‘get’ the indian culture, indian cinema and india. They look at foreign films through the lens of american issues. Which makes me wonder about the 5 nominated films for best foreign film. Do the people in their home nation like those movies?

Yet another real estate mega deal. This one is on the outer ring road for bangalore. It seems like RG Villas, are being marketed mainly towards NRIs. The pricing on the site is all in USD ranging from ~70K to the top end of $430K. Althought most of the single family homes seem to be between 200-280K. While this venture seems quite far from the new airport (14 Miles = 20 KM), the marketing package seems to tout that as a positive.

Last weekend I saw this movie indian move Laage Raho Munna Bhai. I walked in with tempered expectations as this a sequel to a really funny first part. How often do sequels improve on the original? In my opinion - rarely. Given that sequels are very very rare in indian movies, i guessed this would be an average movie at best.
But it was funny as hell. More than being funny, this movie weaved some themes and plot lines to make the movie touching. The story involves a mob boss falling in love with a Radio DJ. He wants to meet her, and manages to win a quiz contest about Gandhi. Yes, Gandhi 1.0 the original - the same one who preached non-violence and love for all human beings. Of course, our mob boss friend tells the DJ that he’s a professor. To keep up his act, he has to really learn about the life and ideals of Gandhi. As he learns about this great man, he starts applying his gandhian principles to tackle the situations he used to tackle with brute force. The movie is funny throughout, but the touching scenes are about the transformation of this mob boss to a gandhian idealist. The movie ends on a high note and is bound to bring a tear or two to viewer’s eyes.
This movie has sub-titles and is playing in the fremont (Naz movie theatres). I’d recommend every one (indian or not) to go watch this movie.

If you are going to watch only one foreign movie this summer, then go see “Lage Raho“

One of the side-effects of visiting india regularly is that i got caught up in all the realestate related excitement in india. Indian cities , especially Hyderabad and Bangalore, have this boom town feel where everyone is excited to make a deal, try new things out and move up fast

I recently put a down payment for a house in a venture called “MapleTown” in an area called Bandlaguda. The pricing was reasonable and most of all i had faith in the realty company. Anyway, those same builders are now selling some more lands/plots near shamshabad (where the new intl airport is expected). Here is the blurb from the marketing executive - Mohammed.

This is Mohammed here from Radha Realtors Pvt. Ltd. After the stupendous success of our Housing Project MAPLE TOWN now we are Launching our new project OXY-GEN CITY at KANDUKUR on Srisailam Highway. OXY-GEN CITY is a 700 acre Integrated Township first of its kind in Hyderabad City with Independent Duplex Villas, Residential plots, 60 acre 9 hole golf course, 30 acre Cricket stadium, 20 acre International School, 33 acre theme park (Ocean Park), 20 acre Medico Tourism Project, 2 Club Houses, Helipad, Bowling alleys, Commercial Spaces, 100ft, 60ft & 40ft roads, 1.5 acre Road Junctions and Many more.

OXY-GEN CITY is located about 4 kms to MUCHERLA I.T. Park, 15 Kms from OUTER RING ROAD, FAB CITY, NANO TECH PARK & HARDWARE PARK and surrounded by SEZ’s ( Special Economic Zones) . OXY-GEN CITY accommodates about 300 King Sized Villas and 3500 Residential Plots. Each Independent Villa is Centrally air conditioned in 1200 sq.yds of land, 4300 sft of built up area with own private swimming pool. Residential Plots ranging from 500 - 1200 sq.yds. Please find the Location Map & Layout copy of OXY-GEN CITY as an attachment.

Mohammed’s contact number - +91-98492-31784. So if you contact him and end up buying properties in either maple town or this new oxygen city, let me know. I’d be interested in seeing if this blog is effective.
I am attaching couple or marketing images he sent. Location & layout

You have to be an indian citizen or person of indian origin to be able to purchase land in india.

In the last year i have visited india 3 times and going back there again in early august. My needs to send US dollars to india (for my expenses and family expenses) increased a great deal compared to before. India is getting more expensive and i noticed that i was sending decent sums of money to india.

What took me a few transactions to notice is the extra charges credit cards charge and how various banks give a conversion rate that’s much much lower than what’s quoted on yahoo! finance. There is a huge difference in rate citibank offers to what’s quoted as a exchange rate in the market (almost off by 1 rupee!).

Since then i looked at different ways to send money. Overall, I love money2india.com and i have been using them consistently. It is a service offered by ICICI bank. They can send money to any bank in india, or deliver it by Demand Draft. You can wire money or transfer by ACH. You can send to various types of accounts (NRE , NRO, local etc)!

To top it all off, i have found they had the best rates and they are transparent. The conversion rate is still a tiered structure - you get a better rate if you send more money - but even along all the tiers, the rates are much better than citibank.

Overall, great service, easy to use and sends money quickly!!!

I guess it’s not a surprise to hear that Hyderabad has changed in the last decade or so. As is the common case with a economically vibrant city, hyderabad attracted a lot of folks from surrounding areas and the population grew tremendously. New people bring their own culture, and hyderabad changed.

Hyderabad used to be a unique city in india in a lot of ways. Back in the 80s/90s,

It’s part of andhra pradesh, but people from andhra were intimidated to visit hyderabad. The indimidation factor ? Language problem

I guess i can keep listing some of these things, but there was a character to the city. It was not a hustly bustly north indian city, nor it was culturally inward focused south indian town/city. Hyderabadi hindi was different, hyderabadi attitude was different. In short, Hyderabad and hyderabadis, were unique.

Today, the city is centered at Panjagutta, somajiguda, Khairatabad (prasads + ntr garden), begumpet, ameerpet areas. Abids is not crowded. Roads near LB stadium, basheerbagh are relatively free of traffic compared to panjagutta chowrasta. We could drive through sultan bazaar, find parking, get our shopping done with literally no crowds on a weekday evening. We had much harder time parking in hyderabad central. Hindi is accepted these days, but the language of choice is telugu. Very few hindi movies play and even those don’t play for very long. I doubt, if we’ll see sholay run for 365 continuous days in the present day hyderabad or even deewar playing for 100 days.

This hyderabad, feels a lot like a big vijayawada. May be more open and welcoming to all cultures and languages, but it feels like a distinctly telugu city trying to become a metro, than a historical hindu/muslim city that is a cultural bridge.

I guess these changes are good and economic boom is great. I am just being a bit nostalgic. The hyderabadi unique character is now missing in hyderabad.