Getting 150K and a company board with qualified people on day1 would be very attractive for an H1B engineer like me. So I could bootstrap a startup while having a paid job in a company and if Kima15 invests, this would qualify for an H1B transfer to my own company(Having a board to supervise your company would qualify for H1B transfer).
There are two India's now. The 100 million upwardly mobile middle and richer class living in walled inner cities and the 900 million+ poor and desperate people who need all kinds of poverty alleviation that the government can provide. The 100 million class wants better infrastructure, more tech jobs, open and corruption free democracy, space programs and more and they'll(we'll) get some of it. The rest cannot be helped easily. Even pouring money in rural tech cannot help most. Bulk of the poor now live in urban slums/poor suburbs around big cities. Money that goes to space programs would be a pittance for alleviating the poor masses. For the most part, the poor uneducated people cannot be helped from their own voting decisions that bring corrupt and inefficient politicians and crowd pleasing policies.
As a fellow Indian, I just want to point out that this video and any other efforts to develop people-to-people relationships between India and Pakistan have zero effect on the ongoing conflicts between the nations. Indians love Pakistani singers, cricketers, food, their language(Weird, I'm not a native Hindi speaker. But people tell me that Pakistani's speak better Hindi than most Indians). I've heard from Pak friends that they too love Bollywood and many things India. Even Pak government doesn't wish any ill on India. However the Pak army and ISI have vested interests in keeping conflicts alive. They also fund terrorist organizations in every neighboring country possible. Lack of democracy in Pakistan(Elected governments get routinely overthrown in coups) is a greater problem than religious extremism.
By that extension, lack of democracy in Saudi Arabia, and Egypt was the root cause of all Islamic terrorism. Saudi's actively promote a version of Islam that promotes religious discord in muslim populations across the world. I think the US missed a huge opportunity in encouraging more democracy during Arab spring and even the Iranian uprising.
I agree and so does the finance minister and now president of India. He calls it "peanuts" compared to the Indian economy. I should say they should use the aid for Scotland or other god forsaken places in UK. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/441263/India-sends-a-spa...
No sir, are you complaining about the #280 million aid to India? That's a pittance to the 1.8 trillion dollar and growing economy India is. Sure there are poor people. But we are a growing economy and have a greater need for technology than U.K has. That was always our ticket to prosperity. Who knows, this might open up an Indian empire in the future solar system economy :-)
I wish there where campaigns against exploitative child labor in US and western world. So if a given country's minimum wages are low and they seem to be exporting a lot, the campaign could call for Boycott of products from the country until they raise minimum wages. May be there should be a kickstarter of sorts for launching such campaigns (Money to cover for marketing and other expenses).
Gartner reports are the basis for big corp software evaluations(Wal-Mart's and the banks). If you have to sell software to fortune 500 clients, getting into the gartner quadrant is a must to be considered for evaluation. Gartner publishes magic quadrants for B2B markets(even niche ones).
I dont know who the target is for this. But if it's big enterprises, then this might not be as appealing as it sounds. I used to work for Datacert, a legal apps vendor for large companies(walmart, jpmc, novartis etc). They use e-billing with a well defined format(ledes) all items on an invoice is code with a specific code(UTBMS). We used a rules engine(Drools) to ensure proper billing. A proper use for machine learning in legal space would be simulations for different pricing models(Alternate fee arrangements(AFA) in legal parlance). If machine learning could evaluate different pricing models for a given case and provide inputs, that would be a big selling point.
if the same logic were true, cars would cost 1/60 of labor + reduced price on parts locally made + same price and import duty on imported parts. However cars typically cost twice in India.
A simple explanation would be extra scrutiny for the answer paper evaluators when marks go beyond 80. That might determine the difference between getting home/hotel at 5:00 P.M or sitting with the supervisor, painstakingly cross checking every answer. Picking answer paper evaluators are like picking people for jury duty in US. Its a lottery system for teachers across the board(In this case across India) and once you get selected, its mandatory to show up at the central evaluation center. The evaluations last something like 10-15 days.
Results get published in news paper in India. Anyone with your registration number could get all your marks. Its easy to go back one step and know who is the owner or the exam registration number. In our state(Kerala) they publish a ranking of top 15 rank holders in the state for 10'th and 12'th classes and the kids are treated as celebrities with newspaper and tv coverage.
I think India needs the exact opposite of Bill Gates. We need more people who could industrialize India fast, employ masses of people and take us on par with China,Japan or Korea. India's political parties are left leaning and try to create Europe styled social safety nets. We need more libertarians and rich lobbyists and more copies of Ayn Rand to change the anti - laissez faire policies we have. It's still easy to start a Delaware C corp over internet from India than to register for a local corporation in most states.
Caste System(More like Racism. Keeping groups of people away from economic opportunity), Families where people have been desperately poor for generations(poor people create more kids on average and most of them end of poor and desperate)... 100's or millions with no primary education/even literacy...
Also in US, if you have a latest GPS and have settings setup to avoid Traffic and "the Shortest Time" option, you usually get longer routes avoiding traffic congestion.
For people who qualify for H1B and other immigration visas, the following are true.
1. Vast majority are from really rich families. Like million dollars in family assets. The education is either very expensive or they were top students in their schools, which usually happens because they went to private schools.
2. People working in India never take low pay after 2 years of experience. It's only during the first few years that we trade an opportunity to gain experience with low wages. Theres a very high attrition rate in all it companies in India and salaries are ever increasing.
3. Young Indians have the opposite problem of being hard working. Most spend extended hours in office to socialize than to actually get stuff done.
4. The part about growing smugness is true. Indians traditionally seldom call ourselves "experts" in any thing even if we know stuff.
5. Losing h1b is big deal. You are given notice to leave country with your family in no time. Technically u need to leave the country within a month if you don't want to be barred from reentry. So in that one month, you have to try and sell all your stuff, cars, house, furniture, discontinue schooling for your kids and collect transcripts, medical records,file taxes,payoff debt. Instead most people would jump into any job to hold onto the status.
Missing the trees for the forest. The "hard-working" Indians come from well off families, who can afford private school education for kids. Very few actually move from desperately poor to middle class. I take exception to IT coolies desc. Back when I was in India, my first it coolie salary was more than both my parents combined salaries. At some point before moving to school, I was making more money than the president of India , being an it coolie. It's not how much inr transalated to dollars I was making that mattered. The salaries, low compared to here would bu you a lot of things that you can never afford in us. Like a maid to clean your house, a chauffeur for your car and the like. What is expensive is, real estate in cities because of absense of city planning and anything imported, like cars, gasoline, electronics etc.