Rishabh Kaul's Weblog » Books & Magazines

Data Collection: Now and Then

Rishabh — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:46:28 +0000

I was reading Suicide by Emile Durkheim (this is a link to a summary); a 450 page behemoth with numbers and inferences about suicides. Durkheim’s work has been seminal to the understanding of suicide from a sociological perspective. Durkheim admits in the introduction to the book that attempting such a task such as recording suicide can be quite a challenge given how many deaths can escape this categorization.

I would think that if Durkheim was born in this age, he would be thoroughly pissed. Perhaps, with the rising world population, with more urbanization kicking in and larger sociological factors which could lead to suicide, documenting these facts would be quite a challenge today. The relative detachment from religious institutions which recorded such a data in the past would also be a contributing factor in making it more difficult to assess the numbers. On the other hand, would the state, which has taken over that responsibility (have they?), be recording such data? Or are we left to the mercy of randomized control trials?

I was just thinking about how with rising populations some things would become tougher to assess, no matter how improved the technology is. Not because the technology is lacking, but because contributing factors to a variety of events are coalescing and perhaps our technologies and data gathering techniques are just not able to match up to the speed with which our society and populations are changing.

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

The March of Mobile Money

Rishabh — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:19:35 +0000

Published first on Nextbillion. Much thanks to my Ed, Scott Anderson for the editing.

The term “unbanked” does not always equate to “unbankable.” In fact, it’s often simply a case of banks being unreachable.

I just finished The March of Mobile Money by Sam Pitroda and Mehul Desai, who introduce the concept of the digital wallet and how telecom-enabled commerce is and will continue to break down financial walls, changing the very concept of money in the process.

Pitroda’s name of course is synonymous with India’s ICT revolution. A portion of what Pitroda is propagating is already is being implemented in many regions, including in Kenya with the great success of M PESA (provided by Safaricom). Pitroda however, explains how this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real power of the mobile wallet will come into play when Near Field Communications are used for day-to-day transactions.

Throughout the book, Pitroda emphasizes that for this idea to take shape the three supply-side stakeholders: telecom companies, banks and merchants (retailers), all have to work together. They will need to agree upon how to share customer acquisition as well as cost savings as the technology achieves scale.

Such a model could very well be the answer to financial inclusivity. The key concerns of course would again be security, digitization of all the previous receipts and data. Needless to say, for the mobile wallet to gain widespread acceptance it has to emulate the traditional wallet in ensuring ease of transition.

This can have a huge impact on the banking sector. Currently banks use the help of Business Correspondents (BC) to extend their services (a facility NBFC-MFI are trying to get involved with) to those in hinterlands. The BCs are mostly comprised of retired bankers, teachers and professors. With mobile money coming into the picture, banks initiating tie-ups with major telecoms will penetrate deeper into the pyramid and increase their reach by millions. Banks in India look at mobile devices as a principle way to acquire new customers, whereas in the West, mobiles often are looked upon as just another marketing channel.

The important issue here is the need to open a bank account in the first place. Pitroda feels that financial and social inclusions at the BoP will have to be initiated by the merchants/service providers. They will have to identify the appropriate services or applications, post which banks can provide the necessary financial accounts and services to help facilitate cash-in and cash-put for such services, thereby leveraging the infrastructure of telecos for distribution.

From the retailers’ perspective this is a huge leap to understand consumer-spending patterns. Enterprises can use this to personalize products and services for customers, to generate usage patterns. The digital receipts generated by the mobile transactions can also be used for better planning of household/enterprise expenditures.

The gamut of services that the mobile wallet would encompass would include banking, bill payment, money transfer, insurance, P2P payment, microcredit and finance, NFC/Proximity, prepaid top-up, ticketing, coupon and loyalty, advertising, shopping and gift cards.

The book concludes with a five-step program to wealth creation with mobile money being the major facilitator:

Information and Communication Infrastructure
Knowledge-based initiatives
Right to Information/Education
Delivery of public service/goods
Entrepreneurship and Employment

Pitroda also is quick to note that over time, as the platform evolves, the services could move beyond financials and expand to health, education, governance.

I suggest you give this book a read to get a peek into the future of commerce.

Winter reading list

Rishabh — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:49:39 +0000

I am back home from a fruitful trip to Copenhagen (or Hopenhagen or Flopenhagen; depending on your convenience). I didn’t get as close to the action as I would have liked to (accreditation issues) but still managed to meet some pretty interesting people and generate some food for thought.

It also means that I have tons of compiling of stuff to do and rearrange my notes into meaningful blog posts.

But homecoming also means a visit to the local bookstore. However, since I live in a bylane (or gully), the local bookstore has never existed for me. A trip to Odyssey landed me with the following winter reads.

Photo courtesy State Library and Archives of Florida

Maximum City: Bombay lost & found (Suketu Mehta): I have heard so much about this book. It’s one of those books always lying on the bookshelves waiting to be picked by some inquisitive soul. Finally, it was a review by indie musician Uday Benegal and a reading of a paragraph on an age-old Indian cuss word that made me pick up the book. The book is about Bombay, a city living on the edge, filled up to its brim.

Blessed Unrest: How the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world (Paul Hawken): The book is about how the civil society is changing the world as we know it today. From every nook an corner concerned citizens are forming associations to save the planet, to seek justice, to talk about the abuses of free markets fundamentalism. As Hawken puts it, there is no single name to this movement, no unifying ideology, but it’s there and you are probably a part of it.

Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How cities are changing the world (Jeb Brugman): In this book Jeb argues that the greatest challenge for the 21st century involves in improved city building. He says that the productivity, economic prosperity and political stability of the nation depends on how they embrace urbanisation.

The Game: Penetrating the secret society of pickup artists (Neil Strauss): He is the original pickup artist. Nuff said.

Changing my mind (Zadie Smith): My bong friend had recommended Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to me last year. I never really got around to purchasing that novel. What I didn manage to purchase though was Smith’s collection of non fiction essays on writing called Changing my Mind. Smith says “When you are first published at a young age, you’re writing grows with you-and in public. Changing my mind seemed an apt, confessional title to describe this process.”

Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics (David Smith): Pop Economics, though hoping to be a better read than Freakonomics.

What we say goes (Noam Chomsky): Disturbing conclusions about US imperialism it seems and what could civil society do about it. Was recommended to me by a close pal.

Liars Poker (Micheal Lewis): This one is supposed to be better than Wall Street. Let’s give it a shot.

India after Gandhi: The history of the world’s largest democracy (Ramachandra Guha): This is one bulky book and I hope to consume it one gulp at a time.

I am also currently about to finish Cleo Paskal‘s Global Warring. The book was gifted to me by Cleo herself (and obviously personally signed) after we got talking at the Fresh Air Center. She was part of a panel discussion in Copenhagen and writes on geopolitics and security. In Global Warring she writes about how environmental concerns will affect global security.

Squirm

Rishabh — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:59:00 +0000

Obviously it’s not a sports magazine.

My friend who studies at Vassar College always goes on about how its possibly the most liberal place on earth.

After flipping through the pages of their in-college sex magazine, I am convinced.

Squirm: The Art of Campus Sex acts as Vassar’s mouthpiece on smut. With user generated prose, poetry, interviews and photography, the magazine says that it will arouse you. It says its a “literary and artistic forum for diverse perspectives on sex, daring to transcend numbing traditional discourses.”

Whats amazing is that the magazine has been funding itself (you can find ads of local sex shops) for over a decade. I can imagine why something like this would be so very radical at Vassar, leave alone India, where its editors would be burnt alive with their houses reduced to rubble.

Inside, one can find views from people of all sexual orientations. Some classy, some intriguing and some just plain bizzare, but all, (in some cases, brutally) honest.

The magazine also contains a lot of resources in form of agencies, numbers you can call when you’re in trouble and support groups.

And Squirm isn’t a lone ranger. According to this article, Swarthmore College publishes its own erotic magazine called Untouchables

Update: I learn that Harvard also has its own smut magazine called H-Bomb, and if my sources are reliable enough, Squirm helped Harvard set it up.

What I have been reading lately…

Rishabh — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:31:00 +0000

These are pages I have been flipping recently…

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the StreetsGang Leader for a Day

For those who have read Freakonomics will remember the chapter about the Indian guy who spent sometime with crackheads and helped come up with material that later became “Why drug dealers live with their moms: in the best seller.

The Indian kid happens to be one of the best social scientists in the world (or so I hear) today and has written a book about the same experience. This was written way back in 2008 but I got my hands on it only recently.

Sudhir Venkatesh describes his times with the drug lords of Chicago and to understand poverty and society better.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an arrogant man. He may also be one of the smartest. Fooled by randomness is an interesting take on probability and how its simple principles have been completely ignored by leading financial giants and how that has screwed them up.

If you have done a course in elementary probability, then you understand the book even better.

But beware, as my friend Nayak says, his arrogance might put
you off from appreciating the book.

Making Globalization Work">Making Globalisation Work

Although I had bought this quite a while back, I stopped reading this in the middle so I could finish Jeffrey Sachs’ Commonwealth. So now I am back to Making Globalisation Work.

The book is about how globalisation is inevitable and in order for it to be sustainable it should try to uplift the poor countries of the world. The world as it stands, is certainly anything but flat.

The book goes about cursing the IMF and other organizations who the author feels aren’t doing much good. He talks at length about his vision for development and how its closely related to social justice (just how many times will I provide a link to Stan’s article, I cant recount, so will not do it this time), other issues include the role of patents in developing countries, access to health care, debt relief, climate change etc etc.

My Friend Sancho-hardly a review

Rishabh — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:03:00 +0000

I had read the book about 3 weeks ago and then procrastinated writing my thoughts about it. But then isn’t that befitting? Considering how the book speaks so highly of the protagonists’ procrastination amongst other things of course.

My Friend Sancho (MFS) is the debut novel of India’s star blogger Amit Varma (more about Amit here). The book is short and addictive and one should seriously finish this is one go. Three pages down and I was laughing out loud, while reading it on a sofa, waiting for my turn at Barbeque Nation. Yes, I know its annoying, never thought I’d have to wait for a table in Hyderabad. Happens.

It’s very very funny. The book I mean.

Abir Ganguly, the book’s lead character, is one heck of a journalist. He is a self proclaimed armchair cynic; jaded, horny and works in the crime beat to come up with gems such as Man swats himself to death. I loved Abir’s character. The exaggerations which are random at times, the pertinent observations and everything else, really made me feel as if I had known Abir all my life. Okay, so maybe I down played the exaggeration part a bit. The lizard is part of the cast, though not big enough to disrupt the storyline. You get the idea.

So Abir’s all fine and chillin’, just another nut in a huge machine. However, things get complicated when he is asked to come up with a story humanizing one Md Iqbal, who was killed in a police encounter.

And thus enters Muneeza, Iqbal’s daughter. And with it the wheels of an innocent love story are set into motion. Varma does a wonderful job of limiting the cliches here. Because Abir does get a boner while Muneeza is pouring her heart out. Just saying.

Now there’s something I must confess. Is it just me (no, turns out I have company)? Or did Muneeza remind you folks of Zaheera from the Best Bakery fiasco too? Because as hard as I tried, I couldn’t fight off that picture.

This was one of my main complaint from the book. The character of Muneeza. Not enough information was given about the sort of girl she was, or maybe the book just ended too quickly. I would have loved the story to extend a little longer. Because after every page I got more and more confused about the sort of person Muneeza was. The end seemed abrupt. I was seriously expecting there to be more to the story.

Okay, I think I sounded a tad too harsh in that last paragraph. Trust me, I simply adore the book. Because of its simplicity and easy nature. Because of Inspector Tombre and what might have been one of the best speeches delivered by a civil servant in the history of this nation. I think one should buy the book for that speech itself. Because Amit so wonderfully expresses human emotions and because I have not laughed so much in a span of 200 pages for a long long time. Strangely, I can compare it to the feeling I got when I first started reading xkcd. There are things we feel and seldom put on paper. MFS does exactly that. For example, look at this

I worked for a couple of hours. That is to say, I tried to work. My mind kept wandering, and the internet gave it places to wander to. Every three minutes I told myself, Just two minutes more, let me just check out this page, then I will work. But I’d check out that page, and click on a link there, or think of something because of what I was reading and go somewhere else, and so on and on until it was almost lunchtime and I was better informed about the world but less so about my own piece.

And that’s just one instance.

Another thing I really enjoyed is that every character has their distinct voice and Amit doesn’t compromise with that.

Dissecting each and every part of the book is something I don’t really intend to do. So I shall say this, do definitely give it a read. Its really easy going yet doesn’t mock your intelligence. Its fun and light. And there is a bit of self publicity, but it’s all in good taste.

I guess at the end of it, one could look at the book as Abir’s myopia.

The book was longlisted for the for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. Read the first chapter here

Crossposted at Mutiny

From Digital Print to the Fine Print: Online Media hitting the stands

Rishabh — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:20:00 +0000

I can never stop talking enough about Mutiny Media. What might have at first seemed like a social experiment 5 years ago just became too big.

An amalgamation of several voices (which many a times have conflicting views amongst themselves), Mutiny.in,ventured into the print space becoming Mutiny Magazine. Obviously, its been quite a challenge but we have been just too optimistic and above all believe in citizen media. The website has been revamped recently with some new features.

What I want to say is, can social media resurrect the presumably stagnant print media. I came across this awesome experiment the other day. It’s called the Printed Blog and does exactly what Mutiny was doing. They take in user generated content and publish it. They have already signed up a lot of bloggers (300 when I last heard) and have got advertisers readily accepting to associate with them. I wish them all the best and will be closely following the venture.

And ofcourse there is the inspirational story of the photoraphy magazine JPG (whose content is user generated), which is unfolding as we speak. The magazine was about to shut down had it not been for the heroic acts of the readers who found new acquirers for the 8020 Media, the media house that publishes JPG.

As everyone as been saying, this will also be a very interesting time for the publishers for obviously the credibility factor will come into play. The views will have to be backed up with facts and bloggers will have to take responsibility of what they publish.

It’s the same story as that of the indi music scene I suppose.

BTW you can download the first issue of the The Printed Blog here

To subscribe to the Print issue of Mutiny, click here