Kamla Bhatt

My new blog site is: http://kamlabhattshow.com/blog

Please update your feed, blogroll etc. etc.

I am shutting down this blogsite

Go over to my new blog site to watch a video clip of Ugadi Puja. If you missed the previous posting about the new blog site here is the url again. http://kamlabhattshow.com/blog

Please update your feeds, blogrolls etc. And as always thanks for your support and encouragement.

Hutch recently announced that it is offering phone back-up service to its customers. What this means is customers can back up their phone book, data and sms for a monthly fee ranging from Rs. 30-50. This new service has a strong potential to grown given the fact that voicemail is almost non-existent among phone and mobile users in India. The preferred way of pinging is SMS or missed calls.

India’s number one mobile operator Bharti Airtel reorganized its top management. According to media reports the reorganization was in response to counter the challenge posed by the new mobile entity Vodafone Essar. Vodafone is the number one mobile operator in the world. At the same time both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar are working on sharing their network infrastructure.

Perhaps the most significant is that Mr. Sunil Mittal, who is the current CEO of the company will vacate that slot and continue to be the chairperson of the company. Starting from next month Mr. Arun Kohli will be the CEO of Bharti Airtel. Mr. Kohli is currently the president of the company. The Economic Times repots:

“Sanjay Kapoor will now be president (mobile services) and Atul Bindal will be president (broadband & telephone services), while David Nishball has been appointed president (enterprise services).”

At the moment Bharti has about 37 million subscribers.

Guess who is going to be featured pretty soon in Bollywood director’s Karan Johar’s show? Shilpa Shetty and her sister Shamita will be Karan’s guests and I suspect we can get to hear lot of juicy tidbits about what happened at the show etc. Shilpa has hit a jackpot and is busy endorsing deals and is also supposedly writing a book?  Did you hear that Shilpa has also bagged a deal to appear on a Broadway show? Well, that should be interesting. I am not sure how the show will do on Broadway. It might have a better reception in the UK.

If you missed watching Karan Johar with Shweta Nanda (Bachchan) on her new show…try watching a re-run. The show runs on NDTV and is called NextGEN It was pretty interesting to hear what K Jo had to say about his interests etc.

India’s number one mobile operator Bharti Airtel reorganized its top management. According to media reports the reorganization was in response to counter the challenge posed by the new mobile entity Vodafone Essar. Vodafone is the number one mobile operator in the world. At the same time both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar are working on sharing their network infrastructure.

Perhaps the most significant is that Mr. Sunil Mittal, who is the current CEO of the company will vacate that slot and continue to be the chairperson of the company. Starting from next month Mr. Arun Kohli will be the CEO of Bharti Airtel. Mr. Kohli is currently the president of the company. The Economic Times repots:

“Sanjay Kapoor will now be president (mobile services) and Atul Bindal will be president (broadband & telephone services), while David Nishball has been appointed president (enterprise services).”

At the moment Bharti has about 37 million subscribers.

Tesla, the new electric car from Silicon Valley has been in the spotlight for a few months now. Apparently the electric car company has borrowed quite a few things from IT companies and hopes to make their product a success like say an Apple.

Elizabeth Corcoran of Forbes has a really nice, long article about Tesla, the company, the thinking behind the company, and when they plan to roll out their first set of wheels. The larger question that the article addresses is can Silicon Valley help reinvent the car. Just like Apple helped reinvent the computer industry when it was caught in the mainframe technology. Who knows maybe Silicon Valley folks can do it. I know if anyone can do something radical in the automobile industry it is these folks in the valley.  The entrepreneurs and engineers in Silicon Valley have a different mind-set and don’t take no for an answer.

Clearly the car’s price tag of $100,000 has not been an obstacle.  They have already sold out their first production batch even before the first Tesla roadster hits the road. There are over 300 people have made a down payment to buy their Tesla.

Reading the article made me nostalgic about driving down 280, which is one of my favorite highways in the Bay area. I hope I get to get a darshan of the car when I am in the Bay area.

Dell is expanding its operations in India and plans to spend $30 million in the next few years in India. Michael Dell, who is currently visiting India also announced that his company will set up a manufacturing plant in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The plant is supposed to be operational by July when it will start shipping computers to its customers.

According to The Economic Times:

“Initial production capacity was seen at an annual 400,000 units, but the firm said it expected to ramp up output rapidly and was looking to employ over 1,000 people.”

Dell has competition in Inda from both US and domestic companies like IBM, HP and HCL.

Yesterday I got a glimpse of the old Bangalore, the Bangalore of my childhood with very few cars on the roads and I must confess that I  enjoyed the drive. I remember a Bangalore that did not have so many cars and two wheelers.  Toady, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone in Bangalore who has a nice thing to say about commuting and traveling in the city. The roads are a mess, and accidents have become a common sight.

But, yesterday it was different. The roads were empty of the usual humdrum because of the official holiday (Ugadi). The only thing that marred the pleasant drive were the couple of cars that belonged to BPOs. You can instantly recognize them because of the way they drive and their disregard to traffic rules and lights. And there is that definite stamp/an air/ or whatever you want to call it that helps you single out these cars: the bored and tired looking young professionals who are ferried from their homes to their offices in these vehicles.

We drove down to South Bangalore, Basvangudi and JP Nagar area to attend an Ugadi pooja at Leela Rao’s catering outfit. Mrs. Rao who is her mid-70s started a home-based catering unit when she was in her mid-60s (which is a bit unusual). Today, her business has grown into a multi-crore business and I went to interview her for my show. I have a video blog of the pooja and an audio interview that will be up and running in the next few days. The pooja reminded me of the old Bangalore when my parents, siblings and I would go to the Sringeri Mutt in Basvangudi (after all these years I still remember the taste of the coconut burfi that we got at the mutt) and then go over to Brahmin’s Cafe to have their famous idli and kapi. I was unable to make it to the cafe, but it is on my list of must-do things in Bangalore. I understand that the cafe is still going strong.

And, then today I was back on the road, and the usual madness ensued. The snarling traffic, the bad drivers, and the noise. What surprises me constantly is the gentle and laid-back nature of many Bangaloreans. There is no road rage, screaming, yelling  when people are stuck in traffic. Now, if this was Madras it would be a whole different game with a few choice sentences thrown in your direction including that famous sentence: Have you told your folks at home today. It sounds a lot more effective when you say that in Tamil.

We finally got our new blog site up and it is part of The Kamla Bhatt Show. You don’t have to go to two different urls to check out the blog and the podcast interviews.  We listened to our readers and listeners and finally integrated the blog and the show on the same website.

There is still some work left on the new blog, so be patient while we work on it. For the next few days I will update this blog and the new blog, but after that I shall stop posting on this blog site. So, please update your feeds, RSS, etc. etc. to reflect the new blog address.

We are also working on another blog related to travel that should be up and running in the next few days. If you are interested in writing about travel tips and places to see anywhere in the world ping me offline and we can take it from there.

Thanks to all those who worked on the new site for the past few months and made it happen.