Six Reasons Why Kerala’s Proposal For Prohibition Will Not Work


Kerala wants to be a dry state http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/kerala-to-close-down-700-bars-sundays-to-be-dry-114082101171_1.html 

It is ironic that I have to write this blog post against it – as a guy who has seen the evil effects of alcoholism at close quarters and with every bit of my soul, I wish this menace went away for good. But as I read more about the proposal by the ruling coalition (ironically called United Democratic Front – given there is very rarely any unity or democracy in how they function ), the more I think this is absolutely misguided, and has no real chance of succeeding. 

1. It is not a well thought through decision

The decision was taken over a few days – with no meaningful public debate. And because of its populist nature with women voters, no political party in Kerala can afford to raise a contrarian view.

2, It was not done for the right reasons

The decision was made mostly for the Chief Minister Chandy to convince the world that he is holier than the already “holier than thou” leader of KPCC V.M Sudheeran. They waged a war for political image and took a short term populist decision – with no sufficient thought to consequences. The other alleged reason is the political pressure from Muslim League and Church leaders. This is no better (if true) – as church and state hardly ever mixes well to make good policies. 

3. There is no practical way to enforce this

When prohibition leads to bootlegging and plenty of flow of illicit alcohol from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, it will be up on the Excise department to curb that. This is a department that is already at just  20% of the needed headcount . There is no way they can staff quickly enough to enforce prohibition

4. When and where did banning alcohol work ?Never

India – including Kerala – has seen what happens when alcohol gets banned . It does not work. It did not work in USA either and they learned the lesson and changed it, and did not go back to prohibition. Alcohol is freely available in USA and you do not need to stand in line to get a bottle of your favorite spirit like you need to do outside a beverages corp outlet in Kerala. Yet, there is rarely a regular public spectacle of drunken people like we see in Kerala. 

5. If the decision was pure in its intentions, why was  government owned beverages corporation given 10 years to close shop while private bars have to be closed right away?

Clearly the government needs revenue from alcohol sales – but does not mind the private sector losing their business. Alcohol sales is probably the leading revenue earner for the state, along with tourism and NRI inflow. Without a doubt prohibition will decrease tourism. So its a double whammy for government revenue. And remember, this is a government that functions on borrowed money and has no fiscal discipline ( look at the plight of  KSRTC for example).

6. Demand and Supply situation will drive up alcohol prices, and worsen the social menace

The social menace arises from the behavior of several men to use money they can ill afford to buy liquor. Now that competition from private bars will be eliminated, beverages corp and 5 star hotels can increase liquor prices to any extent. What this means is that the men who want to drink will now pay a lot more (travelling farther to drink, paying more for that drink, and most likely higher medical expenses incurred by consuming bad quality liquor ) and hence will put their families through even greater pain to cater to their addiction. 

What would have been a better way to handle this situation?

1. Better and continuous education and awareness generation amongst public to enjoy their drink responsibly, and how to get help for those who are addicted.

2. Increase the standards required to run bars and its enforcement, and aggressively close down any that don’t meet the high standards. 

3. Provide government funded counseling and medical treatment for alcoholism. 

4. Make laws that let abused families to get justice, and help get their abusive family members checked into institutions that offer help.

5. Improve enforcement – by modernizing the police force, excise etc. 

6. Decrease alcohol concentration in domestic liquor – especially in beer.

All of this can and should be funded by beverage corp revenue. Alcoholism is a social menace that needs resolution – and government has an important role to play. But it needs to be done in a well thought through way – not in the hasty and populist way it is attempted now. 

I have a whole new appreciation of Business Intelligence now


As many of you know, I grew up as a BI and Data warehousing guy – I have implemented BI for a lot of users across the world . I have collected requirements from shipping clerks as well as CXOs , and in at least a dozen different languages. I have spent countless hours thinking and rethinking data models, how best to transform data and how best to present data to my users.

Along the way, I became a manager and then an executive, and thus became an active consumer of BI myself. But in the big companies like IBM and SAP that I worked at – I learned to live with someone else’s BI design. As far as I can remember, I never had to create significant new requirements . These were rather stable businesses that could be run with minor tweaks to existing BI capabilities. 

And then few months ago, I joined MongoDB and my whole perspective on BI changed. We are for the most part still a startup. We don’t have a huge IT arm that can cater to endless requirements from me and other leaders of the business. Our IT landscape is almost completely SaaS based. If we can hire one more person – we would rather hire to fill a front line technical role to make the product and customer experience better,  or a sales or channel type role to make the business better. For foreseeable future, I don’t expect that to change either.  

We are a global business – and we are growing incredibly fast. And to keep that pace – we need good data, especially when it comes to customer facing business whether it is direct sales or channels (which I run) . Having grown up as a programmer and then a BI guy after that, I have a great affinity for making decisions by numbers. With the speed at which we grow and our lean policies, I don’t really have a lot of time to wait for information to see how things are going – which essentially means I need good quality operational BI at all times. 

We use Salesforce.com for our CRM. I am a first time user of this solution – which might surprise a lot of people. My past experience with CRM has all been in Seibel and SAP CRM. The best part of salesforce.com was that I did not need any training to use it – none at all. My past experience was almost immediately transferable to use the system as a non-expert. My primary use is not as a transactional user who creates or updates opportunities etc. My main goal is that of gaining quick visibility into the aggregate opportunity to order process for channel business, with the ability to drill down into details as needed.

Once I got settled in my new role, and got to know my team better – my immediate priority was to get a full view of the global business. I mocked up initial requirements into spreadsheets and discussed it on phone with my partner manager Guillaume in Dublin, who is an experienced salesforce user. From my past consultant life – I estimated the effort required as a few months in the technologies I grew up with (assuming I got the most skilled people I could find). Next day morning, I saw Guillaume already had 3 dashboards ready for me which showed most of the information I needed. And then in 2 more daily scrums – I had the 6 dashboards I needed to view the business from every dimension I care about. That is much less than the time it would have taken me to write a proposal for a customer for this work in my past life. 

What did I learn from this experience ?

A lot of good things for sure

1. Business users like Guillaume (and Luca, his boss who runs channels in EMEA for MongoDB) are better BI consultants than anyone I could have ever hired from outside. He not only knew the technology well, he knew my business well and could challenge my assumptions and give me new ideas. It has convinced me that rest of my team including me should step up our skills in salesforce.

2. The technology to build operational reports should be extremely simple so that business teams can iterate quickly. Till I saw it with my own eyes, I did not believe that it could be this easy.

3. From prior life as a programmer and a BI guy, I am well aware of the limitations in reporting – so I can minimize the churn in requirements gathering and make good compromises on what needs to be measured.

4. The simplicity of reports and the report writing technology – and my big time aversion to any transformations (having seen how data loses meaning way too many times) – helps us stay nimble and make changes on the fly. 

There are also some areas of improvement of technology , which I am sure Alex Dayon and team will fix at some point, hopefully soon .

1. Charting and visualization is very limited – so when multiple graphs are put next to each other it is quite a strain to discern information quickly. Granted, the ease of changing things on the fly is more important to me than flashy reports.

2. Only 20 controls possible in a dashboard. I can compromise on it for now, but as business grows – this is a pretty serious limitation for me to get a global view across everything I need to monitor and act on. 

3. Reporting across objects looks limited – but this could just be my lack of experience.

4. Operational reporting does not replace the need for a data warehouse . I still need some other place to combine the lead to order process with information from from Finance, HR etc. For my current purposes, I have work arounds – but if all the SaaS vendors for CRM, Finance, HR co-operated and built a BI solution to seamlessly provide me with integrated data – I will swipe my credit card happily to buy it. 

Dog Shows – Where Rational People Do Irrational Things


Dog shows are a fascinating ecosystem by itself – with a lot of participants like owners, breeders, handlers, judges, trainers, backers, vets, psychics, merchants ….and dogs. Ancient lore has it that people started dog shows as a way to select the best dogs for breeding. If you walk into the world of dog shows today – you probably will hear that line from a mentor, but if you look around and form an independent opinion, you will be forgiven for being a skeptic.

To begin with – I personally don’t know an owner, backer or a breeder who makes any money out of show dogs. At best they get bragging rights. At worst they take a second mortgage on their houses. All the other parties like handlers, merchants etc make money off show dogs, but the percentage of people who make a good living off dogs is an extreme minority. 

On the expense side – it costs a pretty penny to be competitive.

Take dog food for example. Pet food is an industry worth about $18Billion a year. It is virtually a recession proof industry too – people tend to feed animals even when they tighten their belts. In fact people spend more money on pet food than on baby food. Now – all that money doesn’t come from show dog owners – but a good portion does, and that I am guessing is the high margin part of that business. I am a part of some show dog communities online – and it is fascinating to see the discussions on what to feed the dog. 

Or take showing expenses – handling expenses, advertising , health clearances, transportation etc . It takes about $5000 on the “I am lucky” end to about $20000 on the “I am one of the regular suckers” end to finish the championship titles on a dog. And if the dog is a “special” – this is just table stakes. It can cost anywhere up to a half million dollars to campaign a dog at 200 shows a year. That is my rough guess math – I have not done this myself. And those people who spend that kind of money – usually backers, who put their money behind a dog they and their handler feel can go all the way –  are not exactly very visible in dog shows either. I know a few – all good people who come from money, but they can barely explain why they do it. Not one of them seems to be the type who needs to win a Top 20 competition to show off their wealth. But they all do it – year after year. They all love dogs and take excellent care of dogs and spare no expense – but very few keep the dogs after the year or two they are shown. The dogs retire elsewhere – either with handlers, or with original owners or placed with someone else. 

To give you a personal example – the first thing I did after getting a job in USA is to buy a German Shepherd in Germany, send her to a friend in India to show and following along her progress from USA. I met the dog personally less than 10 times. Thankfully my friend took exceptional good care of her and I realized the folly of this exercise readily (but not before a few more such attempts were made – with other friends and other countries involved)  🙂

Money is not the only irrational part of this scenario. It is a subjective sport with its own idiosyncrasies. Take one of the smaller breeds like the smooth fox terrier. They are supposed to look like a cleverly made hunter. There are very very few owners or judges who hunt. How exactly are they supposed to know what a cleverly made hunter looks like ? Or take a larger breed like the ever popular Labrador retriever. If you look like a male lab in the specials ring, you will see a heavy dog – probably 120 lbs in weight ( looks like it – never physically lifted one myself to check) . Many of them finish their hunting titles too – except they look a lot leaner when they are in field training. Is it not odd that a lab who is in good shape for hunting cannot win a breed show in most cases without putting on extra weight? Labs are also supposed to be “short coupled” – as are goldens. Yet, it will be really hard to get a few breeders to agree on what exactly that means. Not to worry – generations that went before us argued about this just as fiercely as we do today. 

Then there are the judges. Every time I feel bad about flying 100s of thousands of miles a year on work stuff, I remember there are dog show judges who fly as much or more than I do, and usually in less comfort. These ladies and gents are supposed to be 100% impartial . But if you look at the expenses I mentioned above – a big chunk is about advertising. Why would anyone advertise their show dog? Typically to attract the attention of the judges. So the deal is that the people writing checkbooks will go all out to influence a judge via advertisements in magazines, social media etc – yet the judge should be impartial. In the world of dog shows – this is totally normal stuff. If a judge likes a photo of a dog (or heaven forbid make a comment) on facebook – that is almost reason for a small riot. When I was a young boy, I had wanted to be a judge. You can’t make me one by holding a gun to my head now – no thank you 🙂

OK so back to the question of finding breeding stock as a reason for shows. Responsible breeders tend to check all kinds of health problems for their dogs and their ancestors before they are bred. Yet, if you check the top specials in the ring – you will find a good number do not have good clearances. It does not worry me at all – because I am not forced to buy a puppy from a dog I don’t like. I personally know of a dog and a bitch with “fair” ratings for their hips (the minimum passable score)  being bred and resulting in many pups in the litter not passing their hip tests. It certainly did not stop the dog or the bitch from being bred again. This is not some super secret story that only I know of – its unfortunately pretty common place. As with everything else in today’s world – buyer beware ! Dog breeding is more art, and less science. You need a lot of luck to get a pup that pans out. 

It is generally a losing battle to breed healthy dogs – simply because most breeds have been around for only a century or so. From that small a gene pool – its hard to not breed closely. However hard you try, you will inadvertently mess up. Yet – good breeders soldier on. This is mostly why I stay away from breeding completely. I would much rather pay a premium to buy a puppy from a good breeder than try my hand at breeding. If the pup turns out ok – I show him. If not – he stays home. And since I don’t handle any more myself – I don’t miss shows all that much. I am totally happy to spend some money on a good handler to show my dog. 

So am I rational ? hell no – I am as irrational as everyone else in the game. I have spent way more on dogs than I should have – and even today if I see an unusually good dog, I get goosebumps and an urge to buy it and walk into a ring. And as long as I can afford it, why not ? there is always that option of taking a second mortgage, right ? Hobbies are irrational I guess – and I have enough rational stuff to worry about that I am kind of happy to let this side of my life be a tad(?) irrational 🙂