Sujavna 2:48 & 49

It is 11 am on 25 November 2012

Today I will attempt to write on 50 new ways of doing things better in a world that is starved of resources. I hope my lateral thinking capabilities can meet this challenge. I start with the first list of 10 new ideas, and hope that I will be able to generate a complete list in the next few blogs.

So my list, with no order of importance, is as follows:

1.       Schools and Colleges could run all 3 shifts with retired teachers and administrators as well as talented senior students augmenting the staff resources and the 1^st shift students cross-subsidising the 2^nd and 3^rd shifts of less-privileged students.

2.       Schools and Colleges offer their classroom space and infrastructure after normal hours, for commercial use and use the income from such rents to maintain and augment their teaching infrastructure. Designing easily-convertible paraphernalia for teaching and non-teaching use would be required.

3.       I have mentioned this in one of my earlier blogs, but it is worth repeating – public services such as post offices, pharmacies, and government offices should be operational 24 x7x365 by using economically-weak students who could be paid stipends for the hours they spend.

4.       Public entertainment centres, such as cinema theatres and multiplexes, could offer their infrastructure for public seminars, NGO events, during non-box-office periods as part of their CSR initiatives.

5.       Hygiene and Safety Audits become mandatory for every commercial activity and large communities (with residents numbering over 100 family-units) and a combination of incentives and taxes based on the audits ensure that hygiene and safety performance is of a high standard.

6.       Move away from individual family kitchens (that result in dispersed inefficient energy use systems and ineffective control of nutritional requirements) to a system of centralised large-format kitchens that are able to efficiently manufacture, procure, process and distribute foods and drinks to consumers as and when they want using economies of scale.

7.       Newspapers and magazines to be distributed only digitally, to the consumers’ TV, PC  or mobile screens. Even for those that do not have such gadgets, public libraries will have such facilities and provide a service of viewing news and magazines, free for the public.

8.       A password locker application on mobile handsets that can retrieve passwords in under a minute, remind users with timely alerts about need to renew passwords. There could also be a new insurance product that insures one against material and intangible losses upon password hacking.

9.       A system by which passports are embedded with biometric data that can be scanned and verified by placing the passport on an aircraft’s door alongside a physical biometric verification gadget that will then match and send data to both departure and arrival countries and so obviates the need for visa processing and monitoring of illegal immigration.

10.   Capture of intermittent sound energy from rock concerts and high-decibel firecrackers and conversion and storage of such captured energy into electrical power.

Wishing you a good weekend. My next blog will be on 8 December.

Sujavna 2:46&47

It is 11am on November 18 2012

And apologies for missing out on last week’s blog. Hope all of you had a great week and those of you who celebrate Diwali had a joyous celebration.

Can we consider community radio as a great innovation in the context of universal healthcare? Most of us would not think so, as radio has been around long enough and a great number of government-sponsored social welfare programs have used the medium to communicate. And some healthcare professionals (especially clinical physicians) have strong opinions on what all can go wrong with the use of this medium. And yet, I was excited by a presentation made by a catholic priest who spoke at a healthcare conference on why he strongly believes that the community radio station that he runs in a Tier 3 city in India has been as much of an innovation as tele-medicine, and perhaps even more as there is a strong participation of the most-important stakeholder – the patient! The moot point is that when one defines innovation as a creative approach to deliver value to stakeholders through sustainable ways (whether one uses technology or not), then the priest does have a case that needs immense appreciation. To me, the excitement is not just in the Quilon community radio case, but in how the model can be replicated in the next 500 communities across India. What innovations will be required to get a buy-in from government, clinical physicians and last-mile health workers to adopt and adapt such successes?

The loss of life and property in Gaza strip which continues to be a main part of media coverage of incidents in Israel and Palestine, leave me to wonder as to whether politics and centralized-governance could have been the worst innovations in human existence. Is there still a scope for lateral thinking to provide long-lasting peace for this region? Am I right in thinking that the United Nations has failed in its duty to manage peace in this region and is it time for this body to acknowledge its failure and use a threat of an economic embargo of this region in 3 years time unless the leaders of Israel and Palestine agree to, and complete implementation of a political settlement of all disputes that can be monitored by the world body.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend and a great week ahead.

Sujavna 2:45

It is 11am on Nov 4 2012.

It encourages me a lot to know that there are hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings across the world who continue to exercise their faculties to innovate and improvise on solutions that impact their individual livelihoods, and I am also inspired to realize that there are people like Peter Neumann, who in his eightieth year continues to think laterally on possible innovations that will make computers and computer networks resiliently adaptive in terms of security. I recently read a report on how this pioneer in applied mathematics and computing is leading teams that are asking questions such as “How do you kill the computer to save it?”

Innovation requires bold experimentation, and even the most successful of innovators fumble and fail in some of their experiments. I was reminded about this simple home-truth yesterday when I attended a fusion music concert by India’s well-acclaimed Santoor (an Indian string instrument) exponent Rahul Sharma who attempted to fuse his music with South African saxophonist Buddy Wells and Carnatic music Kanjira (a percussion instrument) exponent SelvaGanesh. The experiment can at best be described as “not a disaster”. But music lovers would clearly have realized the potential for such a fusion of instruments by noticing what was wrong in the choice of the compositions! And therein, I realized, lies the beauty of experimentation – it gives an enormous opportunity to learn and improve and perfect!

Wishing you all a great week ahead.