Ideas #19: Learn Chinese, Talk German

This is an idea for all the HRD and Education ministers of the world. As per Wikipedia, following are the major 10 spoken languages, based on the number of native speakers:

Language                 Encarta estimate
Mandarin                 1,210,000,000
Hindi/Urdu                366,000,000
English                        341,000,000
Spanish                       322,200,000
Arabic                         422,039,637
Bengali                        207,000,000
Portuguese                176,000,000
Russian                       167,000,000
Japanese                     125,000,000
German                       100,130,000

What if all children around the world are taught these languages at school and over let’s say the next 25 years the entire world population is able to converse in all these languages.

You may ask why learn all these languages and not just pick one and make everyone learn that one language well. It’s simply because diversity and not homogenization of society is the solution to all problems that we currently face.

At the same though, it will be unimaginably useful for us to learn to communicate with people in their native languages. This reason is this. There are 4 major factors that divide human beings; colour of the skin, spoken language, day to day culture and economic status. Apart from colour of skin which we cannot change (at least through natural means) all the other 3 aspects are pretty flexible and have been developed by human beings over aeons of time to suit individual conveniences.

In my opinion if all of us are able to systematically learn all of these languages it will trigger unprecedented inter mingling of the society, help us understand other cultures better which in turn will improve and accelerate trade and the overall economic balance (Of course improving economic balance has other dependencies like availability of resources, human greed etc.) This is an idea that can be vaguely likened to a butterfly effect.

I can’t wait to see a day when I can say “Guten Morgen” to a Pakistani gentleman and hear him respond with a “Ni Hao”!!

Idea #18: The Cockroach Confusion

We have been facing a cockroach menace recently in our house and you will soon find out that it’s a menace in many ways.

To begin with these are not your typical large sized cockroaches. That was the only kind of cockroach I ever knew before I discovered this new species in my house, these seem to be some new genetically mutated breed! They are much smaller in size and come in 3 different sizes, small, smaller and smallest with the smallest being the size of an ant and the largest being double the size of a mosquito! But anyways that’s just beside the point; I don’t intend to discuss the entomology of cockroaches here.

What I do want to place before you is the dilemma in my mind that happens when I see a cockroach in the kitchen. The big question is, whether to kill or not?

In this regard my wife has a simple theory that cockroaches don’t deserve to exist, at least not in kitchens because they are ……., actually there is no ‘because.…’ for her. It’s just a matter of fact, like when you wake up in the morning, you brush; when you are hungry, you eat; when you see a cockroach, you kill!! Thus she effortlessly and with great élan swats them without blinking an eye lid.

For me killing a cockroach is a matter of great dilemma and turmoil. Not because of virtuousness for anything but it’s more to do with the fact that I see them in a very animated way. Perhaps it’s my love for animated cartoon characters which is at the heart of this dilemma. Think about it, can you ever harm let alone kill Jerry the mouse or Nemo the fish? It’s impossible.

So when I see a cockroach I start to wonder. What if this guy is going for walk to become healthy? What if he is packing some nice fresh food for his family? What if it’s a lady cockroach, wouldn’t I be a coward to kill an unarmed lady? etc etc. All these thoughts cross my mind and more often than not the cockroaches get away from me before I can make a decision. But sometimes when I am in that ‘cockroaches have to be killed as a matter of fact’ mood I just swat them away. But I must confess that I go through pangs of guilt and pain when I see them dead. It just doesn’t ‘feel’ the right thing to do.

I am curious to know how you handle this cockroach situation if you happen to face it. I told you earlier, cockroaches are a menace in more than one way.

Idea #17: I-Pal

I-Pal is an application for Iphone. I-Pal is your personal Iphone buddy. It’s an animated character that “lives” and “hangs out” in your phone and has 'meaningless' conversations with you! (that’s what we do normally with friends, isn’t it?). I-Pal is the closest thing to having a quirky friend inside your I-Phone.

Here’s what I-Pal does or does not (as the case may turn out to be),

1. The primary use of I-Pal is to talk nonsensical gibberish anytime and anywhere. Here’s how it works,

• I-Pal will contain a predefined list of responses, responses that are fairly general in nature but can be categorised as humour, movie dialogues, quotes, spiritual wisdom, health tips, business gyan and general chatter that we use in daily life. It will have hundreds of such responses. It will also have a built in random response generator

• You can invoke a conversation with I-Pal by asking a question, passing a comment, talking about how you feel and pretty much anything

• I-Pal using its random generator and the set of predefined responses will throw back at you a response. The responses from I-Pal are random, mostly illogical, not connected to the question or the point you made!

• You can however decide the categories of responses by pre configuring the category. The categories could be humorous one liner, movie quotes, spiritual wisdom, business gyan, health tip, celebrity gossip etc

• You interact with I-Pal by just talking into the phone but I-Pal will display its response as a text message within the application

Examples of the conversations and responses from I-Pal

User: Good Morning I-Pal
I-Pal: I had my dinner!!

User: What are you doing I-Pal?
I-Pal: Inaction is a subtle form of action!!

At times the responses can be ‘accidentally relevant’

User: Feel like seeing a movie I-Pal…
I-Pal: Starts Itune and plays the Iron Man movie (see the next point)

• I-Pal can also respond by randomly playing a song or a video from your playlist

To summarize, I-Pal is an animated character that generates random preconfigured text (could eventually be voice) responses to the user’s voice input messages.

Idea #16: To write or not to write

You know I started writing a blog post about the idea of God; concepts and misconceptions about God and related ideas. I had in fact written a detailed post but somehow I was not able to complete it and the thoughts were not flowing freely.

In the meanwhile some other work distracted my attention and I decided to save the draft and thought of completing it later. While I was preoccupied doing something else a thought struck me that one should avoid writing or discussing about the idea of God. God is a matter of personal experience and no individual can overrate or undermine any concepts of God. Hence its best not discussed.

I have always liked the phrase, ‘to each his own’, and this is especially true in the case of God!!

Idea #15: The Idea of Dependence

Why is it that new born babies and old people have so many similarities?

Both are so dependent on others even for very basic needs like eating, moving around and it’s generally impossible for them to get through any activity without someone constantly paying attention to them.

I felt today that this is nature’s way teaching us the “idea of dependence”, that by depending on others and completely trusting them in a very innocent way we are being natural, in the true sense of the word natural which means to ‘be in accordance with nature’.   

The dictionary meaning of the word Independent is, “not begin dependent” but I would prefer to think of it as, “In being dependent”.

Idea #14: The Currency of Currency!

This idea came up in a discussion with my friends a few years ago. I think the idea just evolved during our discussion so no one person can be credited to it.

Money is often considered as the root of most evils and that it corrupts people beyond redemption. If we think about it though, it’s not money but the hoarding of it and the imbalance that the hoarding creates in society which is the main problem.
The idea goes like this. What if the wealth of an individual had an expiry date? One may have any amount of wealth but will seize to be theirs after a certain time. So what ever they want to do with the wealth has to be done within the set period.

After the expiry date whatever wealth remains goes to a common world pool and will be circulated to others after that. This happens to every single individual globally. So one can hoard money beyond a certain period and since hoarding money doesn’t make sense people will be perpetually spending and money is always in circulation and never away in bank lockers and deposits.

On the surface this sounds like a socialist idea but hang on there is an interesting twist here.

Irrespective of how much money you own you are allowed to spend only a certain amount before which the total amount expires. You may ask why? It’s simple actually. Since individual wealth has an expiry date everyone will be greedy to buy and hoard ‘things’ instead of money and soon the world will run out of resources and be unable to feed this kind of consumption. Hence the limit on spending.

What about profits, motivation to succeed, to become rich to excel etc etc. What’s the point if I cannot even keep my money?
Well there is a solution to this too. But before that please pause to think of the possibilities that the above process can create. Money is constantly in circulation, we will never have disproportional inflation or deflation. Markets won’t crash because of the circulation of money etc etc.
Now coming back to the bit about motivation to succeed and how do we differentiate the performer v/s the non performer. Simply by allocating lesser amounts and much more time to spend that money and adding a condition that subsequent allocation will not happen till that prolonged expiry date runs out. High performers are allocated more money and faster expiry dates and quicker fresh allocation. So there you go, there is enough monetary reason for you to be successful and excel at what you do.

So the key rules of this system are,

1. Money has an expiry date for the individual after which it moves on
2. You can spend only a limited amount within each expiry period
3. Non performers are allocated lesser money and more time to spend it
4. High performers are allocated more money, faster expiry dates and quicker new allocation

So, how current is your currency?

Idea #13: Individual Changes

This one is an idea but not in the normal sense of the term. It’s like that prayer that is blogged in an earlier post, something that is in practice elsewhere that I wanted to share on this blog.

The idea is simple but the most profound one that I have ever heard and it’s not a coincidence that it comes from a great saint. Here’s how it goes,

“Individual changes can only create lasting changes in the Society”

Simple, isn’t it? Now put this to practice on yourself and let me know how it’s works for you. It’s not that simple after all!

Idea #12: TIM - The Ideas Market

TIM stands for the “The Ideas Market”. TIM is a web service that acts as a platform to trade ideas.

Most people have ideas but lack Resources, Readiness and Rigor (3Rs of Execution!) to bring these ideas to life. Many on the other hand may have the 3Rs but lack the ideas or concepts to begin with.

TIM bridges this gap by connecting people who have the ideas to people who need ideas to execute.

Please do not confuse this with concept of investors or private equities. TIM is an open market place where anyone can sell or buy ideas.

The process works something like this,

1. X has an idea but lack the 3Rs to execute. Also X is not inclined to spend energies on the 3Rs
2. X then prepares a business case explaining the idea and revenue model and puts it up for sale on TIM
3. It’s important that the idea be detailed out and not be limited to a high level concept
4. All ideas that goes on TIM will be copyright protected automatically
5. Anyone who is interested in the idea presented by X can bid to buy the idea and can quote a price
6. X can sell the idea based on the highest one time price or based on share allocation that the buyer offers
7. An idea can be sold to more than one buyer if its agreed to be used in non competing scenarios
8. TIM generates revenues by taking a % of the total deal

Idea #11: Itstory

Itstory (pronounced as It’s Story) is the single largest complication and archive of the history of all corporations and institutions that have existed in the last 110 years (from 1900 to 2010). I know what you are thinking. The idea is a dud because such information already exists in Wikipedia and other encyclopaedias. I agree that its there but what they have is a brief overview, summary of companies and not the details.

Itstory will offer unprecedented levels of details and information about every single corporation that has recorded information.

1. How the company came into being?
2. Major milestones
3. All interviews and articles every published about the company in Media
4. TV interviews, Videos, Ads from that company
5. Financial trends and Stock positions
6. A good summary of why the company failed (if it has failed)
7. What are the people involved in those company now doing
8. Rich personal history about the key people of the corporation

This could even be made into comic books or part of school syllabus for children to learn from.
In a nutshell and borrowing from Google’s tag line, Itstory will be,

“Organising the World’s Corporate Information in the most sensible, effective and useful format”

Idea #10: Sing, Talk and Be Silent

Once every week the following will be nice to do,

1. Sing for plants: Stand in front of some plants in a garden or in your house and sing a nice song for them. You have to sing yourself and not play recorded music

2. Talk to animals: Stand near a herd of cows or a dog or even a bird and talk to them. Ask them how they doing? What they think about this world? What are their plans? Just about absolutely anything. The animal or the bird that you are talking to need not be your own pet

3. Be silent: This one may be though to do every week but we can try as and when possible. Just be absolutely silent for an entire day irrespective of whether you are alone or you are in company of others.

Idea #9: Effective Work Out

This is a basic exercise regime that I follow and works well for me. Have cut down about 8kgs in the past 3months using this work out and some basic dieting (reduced deep fried; nothing else).

Here's the workout regime:

1. Treadmill 30mins; average speed of 8kmph
2. Cross trainer 15mins; resistance at 10
3. Squats 2 rounds; total 10kg weight; 20 to 25 repeats at a time
4. Multi gym Cover all basic options at 6kgs; 2 rounds each of 20reps
5. Situps and inclined situp 2 rounds; 20 reps each
6. Pushups 2 rounds;20 reps each
7. Biceps and Triceps 2 rounds; 20 reps; 5kgs on both hands

I do this 3 or 4 times a week.

Idea #8: Google 2018365

This one is an idea for Google. Google turns 20 in 2018. How about Google releasing one app per day, every day of that year from Jan1, 2018 to Dec31, 2018.

Sergey and Larry, giving you this idea 9years in advance. Please think about it.

Idea #7: Unusual Magazine

“Unusual” is a magazine published monthly. The USP of the magazine is that 100% of the content in the magazine is crowd sourced. The articles in the magazine are written by people who submit it. Anyone from around the world can contribute to the articles in the magazine and contributors will be paid if their article is published in the magazine. All articles will be reviewed by the editorial team of “Unusual” before it’s published. “Unusual”, the company will only select, finalize, publish and distribute the magazine and will not create any content of its own.

All articles written should be the original work of the author and should not be sourced from any other media outlet or magazines. The articles can be on any topic whatsoever.  However “Unusual” may issue guidelines on what types of topics to choose from every month to avoid repetition and make the issues interesting. There will be a web version of the “Unusual” magazine too.

Idea #6: A Daily Prayer

At a fixed hour every day close your eyes and give a thought that every one is filled with love. Contemplate on this thought for 15mins.

Idea #5: Slick Sigma

Slick Sigma is a highly customised, event specific Six Sigma methodology.

Traditionally Six Sigma projects go through all aspects of DMAIC for mostly academic and documentation value and not necessarily for sustained positive changes. Most often Six Sigma projects result in immediate benefits but over time these benefits either plateau out or deteriorate.

Another problem with traditional Six Sigma is that it spends too much time on Define and Analyze phase and not as much on Implement and Control phases. This normally happens due to slacking initial enthusiasm and weak management attention to these phases.

Slick Sigma over comes these problems of the traditional method by making Six Sigma a practical day to day tool and does not confine it to academic value and limit it to certain groups of people only.

The key phrases of Slick Sigma are,

• Implement once, Sustain forever
• Significantly reduce total project time
• Measure all phases based on value and impact and not effort

Idea #4: A Concept Restaurant

This is an idea for a concept restaurant.

1. Every country has its most popular, loved by all kind of dishes
2. Take the 3 most populous countries in every continent
3. Take the top 3, most popular recipes from those countries
4. Get authentic recipes from original sources for these dishes
5. Use ingredients that are closest to the original recipe
6. Create a franchisee model
7. Set up these restaurants in each of the represented country

Idea #3: Clog- The Collaborative Microblogger

Clog is a new platform that combines traditional blogging, micro blogging and social media collaboration. The idea is simple. Each Clog comprises of a cluster of members and it’s a closed group system, in the sense that only people within a clog can edit and author but the clog itself can be a public or a private document.

A clog must have a minimum of 3 members and a clog is complete and can be published only when at least 2 or more members of that clog add to the contents of the creator of that session of the clog. Each member can edit only 140 characters and at a time only 5 members can clog. So the maximum allowable characters of a clog is 140*5=700 characters.

The member who starts a clog session can write on any topic but members who add to that clog session have to either continue that session or the last member to edit the clog session must provide a logical link to the first session of that clog thread.

A clog that is publicly listed can be commented, rated by anyone outside the clog.

Idea #2: SoPer!!

Our life is a sequence of activities. Little actions linked in a sequence to form patterns, personalities, societies and our general way of life. Everything is a sequence of events. Any change in one event inevitably leads to changes in the eventuality of the event before the change happened.

What we call as personal changes is actually change in activities. Some changes are conscious, some innate and some coerced by circumstances. If the same activity changes in a large multitude of people at the same time then what we call as changes in the society occur.

SoPer is a social media service that tracks, measures, designs and reports social changes occurring as a result of small personal changes in activity.

It is completely user driven where a user creates of list of activities that comprises his/her daily life. Activities should be as granular and as specific as possible. Once the activities are created the user can trigger changes to an individual or a set of activities and share with other users within a closed or an open group. Others in the group can emulate these changes or trigger their own changes.

Closed groups can create rules of compliance in which a change in activity agreed by a group will be followed by all members of the group. There should be an option for members to opt out.

The changes can be permanent or for a limited period as agreed by the group. Change in activity does not project changes in the outcome but the outcome of the change in activity is a mere observation of the impact of changes. In other words there are no set goals but goals are observed, documented and shared with other users or other groups. These can be made public or can be kept private.

SoPer is intended to provide a social web platform to affect societal changes through small personal activity changes that happens within groups of people.

Idea #1: The Five Destinies

The Five Destinies can be a book. It's a fictional story.

By the year 2012 the world is in a state of chaos due extremely polarised inter religious conflicts. A group of wise and influential elders propose an experiment in social living based religious beliefs.

Five identical islands are created with enough resources to support human habitation for 150 years. Each island is assigned to specific groups of people.

Island1 is meant for Muslims only, Island2 for Hindus, Island3 for Christians, Island4 for equal proportions of Hindus, Muslims and Christians and lastly Island5 is meant only for Scientists (Atheist Scientists)

These groups are assigned to these islands and are closed out from rest of the world completely for 150years. The story unravels the happenings and the state of these islands over the 150 years.