Am I the only one or do all ICICI customers and many non-customers routinely get legitimate looking ICICI bank communication sent via domains which are not icicibank.com and un-subscription forms(hosted on non https server again not icicibank.com) which ask for way more information about you than is required to un-subscribe you. Infact the so called donotcall forms might be used to generate illegitimate leads as opposed to un-subscribing a person who has been spammed and tried to un-subscribe in good faith.

There is a fraud waiting to happen on a large scale and ICICI Bank is responsible. The sleazy Internet practices of clueless, security un-conscious Indian banks and other businesses needs a large doze of self-regulation and infusion of clue.

Indian banks please get a clue. Do not send communication to people who didn't sign up for it. There is no point in a person trying to un-subscribe from a Lead Management System, as everytime a marketing moron decides that he can use the database to start marketing yet another useless and dishonest banking product. Ethics and 'non-fee based' activities of Indian banks obviously don't go together.

For e.g. its dishonest to run ads for apartments on portals and then using that leads database to try and sell retail banking products. Using the leads for a purpose other than they were collected is un-ethical and counter productive.

We are an experienced startup team looking for interns/parttime/telecommute workers for some exciting web 2.0 projects we are executing.

If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.

Whats the deal :
You get:
1. Equity amount depending upon the time commitment you can offer and efficiency of your effort.
2. Experience in bootstrapping a Web 2.0 startup
3. Understanding how to create web scale, high usage, social networking site
3. Lifetime bragging rights, "I helped create this cool site you so love to use"
4. Learn and utilize highly marketable Open Source and technology skills like Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Memcache, nginx, flex etc.

We get:
1. Self motivated force multipliers
2. Potential employee pool from which to hire after we get funded.

What are we looking for :-

1. Hardcore geeks into Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and even Java or with willingness to rapidly learn Ruby on Rails framework.
2. Creative folks who create publicity material with Adobe Photoshop/Pagemaker/Gimp etc. including websites/brochures/copy during college technical fests and would like to try their hand at Human Computer Interaction workflows for a Web 2.0 site and learn in depth XHTML+CSS+Javascript, AJAX, Jquery, YUI etc.

Who should apply :-

0. These are telecommute positions.
1. This is not a training we are looking for fairly self-motivated individuals who can learn on their own without any hand holding. It doesn't matter if you have no industry experience.
2. You should have access to a broadband connection with no download limits and either your own personal PC where you can use Linux environment (or a Virtual Machine with Linux). Or a University/College infrastructure where you have private diskspace (for storing the code) associated with your login account on a secure file server.
3. You shouldn't be encumbered by any Intellectual property, Proprietary rights and Non-disclosure agreements to work in your own time on any project and be able to assign the moral rights of the same to us in lieu of equity into a startup company. We may at our discretion release parts of the projects executed under Open Source Licenses.

So if you want to contribute to an exciting early stage startup for equity then e-mail us at tarundua at tarundua dot net

Two great blogs on finance and economy focussed on India from BH Economics Blog Awards 2008

1- Ajay Shah's Blog I heard him speak about patents, trademarks and copyrights a long time back at a Linux Delhi meet. Nowadays he is all over media( the portion of media which has a clue ) busting myths propagated by our venerable government and calling spade a spade.
2- Mostly Economics

Are India's opposition politicians/policy makers(and most of the media covering them) blind or deaf or statistically challenged or just that demagoguery is their only religion. Oppose everything(politicians), or objectively analyze everything(media), understand nothing and refuse to ask the real questions, public interest and a 'free' market economy be damned.

The dichotomy of trying to run a market economy with a monetary policy suitable for socialist era is explained brilliantly by Ajay Shah
<Quote>
India is in a big mess on monetary policy. The attempt that is under way consists of pegging the rupee to the dollar at a time when the dollar has dropped sharply. Dollar prices of many commodities have risen since producers do not like being short-changed with the same number of dollars. Holding Rs 40 a dollar intact, the global increase in commodity prices has been imported into India.
</Quote>

Long ago in early nineties the first gulf war oil shocks caused a meltdown in an in-efficient license quota raj riddled indian economy(read no one bought anything from us) resulting in a balance of payments crisis. That was then, between now and then the economy was put on a path of economic liberalization but riddled with roadblocks, speed breakers and toll booths just like our highways. The politics in India is so bad that any political party in opposition goes on to oppose the same policies they implemented while they were a part of executive( in power ).

The monetary policy followed by India is best described by this dialog from the bollywood film Rang De Basanti "ek paon past mein, ek paon future mein, isiliye to aaj pe moot rahe hain (we have one leg in past, one leg in future, that is why we are pissing on the present)".