Mumbai Flood Warnings

A meeting of the Disaster Management department of Mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for pre monsoon preparations took place recently which was attended by officers’ from Police , Government, army, CRPF, Meteorological department, Central & Western Railway, western railway and other government departments.

Mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) published the 19 days of high tide as Red letter days in the rainy season between June 22 and September 21 for this year, which means when the crest of waves at high tide is over four meters and there is heavy rain at same time , the possibility of the city flooding is very high.

The dates of high tides – June -22 to 27, July-21 to 26 , August – 19 to 23 , September – 18 to 21

Floods in Mumbai are attributable to simultaneous occurrence of rainfall and high tides. If, the rainfall is in excess of 200 mm in a day (24 hrs), floods can occur anytime irrespective of tides. However, if there is moderate rainfall but the tide is in excess of 4.50 meters at the same time, the city of Mumbai is sure to get flooded. Accordingly, heavy floods are anticipated on the following days in Mumbai, if there is excessive rainfall at the time of high tides, since the tides are extremely high on the following days.

24 June 2009 Wednesday 1:41 PM 4.95 m high tide

25 June 2009 Thursday 2:24 PM 4.97m high tide

23 July 2009 Thursday 1:23 PM 5.01m high tide

24 July 2009 Friday 2:03 PM 5.05m high tide

24 July 2009 Friday 2:03 PM 5.05m high tide

BMC has already planned to keep the schools closed on 24 July 2009 since the tide level is record high of last 100 years on this day.

Mumbaikars are, therefore, requested to cooperate with the administration by restricting their movements and certainly not to take their vehicles out on the roads these days.

There are speculations about very high waves on 22 July 2009 due to solar eclipse. Public should, therefore, keep away from the beaches that day.

Request you to advise your friends and relatives outside Mumbai not to plan a trip to Mumbai around these days.

All associates need to avoid low-lying areas that appear to be flooded, “extremely cautious” when driving or walking during periods of flooding. Please exercise caution while moving out and monitor local media reports. Among other sources, weather forecasts are also available at:

http://www.weather-forecast.com/locations/Mumbai/forecasts/latest

and at

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=mumbai.

Issued in the interest of Mumbaikars, fellow Indians and those traveling to Mumbai. Please refer to local newspapers, TV & Radio Channels for more information.

Why Some People Have All the Luck

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve?

A psychologist says he has discovered the answer. His study in his own words:--

Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments.

The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50."

This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.. They go to parties' intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person.

Dramatic results! These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.

The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky.

Finally, I had found the elusive "luck factor".

Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:

1) Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right

2) Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine

3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well

4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.

Have a Lucky day and work for it..

The happiest people in the world are not those who have no problems, but those who learn to live with things

By Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire, came to me in one of the forwarded emails and found very useful in these hard times.

To survive, join MLM?

I have been a follower of Network or Direct Marketing, aka MLM, for a long time now. I started following MLM way back in 1991 when a set of Encyclopedia was being sold in India at a price of INR 15,000/- or US$ 300.00. These MLMers were going door-to-door to sell their products and increase their levels or chains to earn more and more. I then saw a mushroom growth of such products and companies coming to India and offering the "distributorship" of their products to those who want to earn an extra income and be a leader. These products range from household goods, toiletries, microwave-proof utensils, herbal products and even mattresses (costing INR 100,000/- or so).

After getting into one such MLM as a distributor, I realized that the one at the top ( the one who starts early) is the one who is benefited the most. The ones who join late in the chain often end up in just slogging without earning a penny.

Recently, I came across a different Direct marketing concept called Binary Marketing Plan. I found this plan to be better that the traditional MLM as this required you to introduce to only two people. Also, there was no re-purchase or trading required to earn commissions. but being based on "binary", your chain goes on increasing in the multiples of two, thereby you having a potentially great earning opportunity.

Like any other business or even if you are salaried, any of these plans work well and get you more money only if you strive hard to earn a lot. Potential does exists in all the systems, it is only you who need to explore the same and get going.

In these days of recessions and instability in business and job market, I strongly feel that MLM is the only ray of hope to survive and earn that much-required extra income to support our family.

Comments please....

~ Sudheer Bag,
spbaag@gmail.com

CRM : A Software or A Culture

Much is written and discussed about Customer Relationship Management (CRM in short) and its implications on the business of any organization. CRM has also led to a large number of organizations developing software for the specific needs of their customers who would use their CRM applications to manage and maintain Customer Relationships.

In the age where customer is the “Emperor”, CRM has become inevitable and the use of the same for any corporate cannot be just ignored. However, CRM is not just a software or a tool to be installed and implemented enterprise-wide. CRM is a culture, a culture that needs to be inculcated from top to bottom and within every employee of the organization, either facing the customer or working at back-end.

Indian industry these days is becoming sensitive to its customers. Thanks to global impacts and to some extent government initiatives to protect consumers and customers. In the world where competition in fierce, it has become very important not only to attract new customers but to retain the existing ones.

This has also demanded the use of a good CRM application properly implemented across all major functions within the organization. Major players like Siebel, Microsoft, Talisma, Oracle have already established their presence in the Indian market and are having large installations for big organizations. However, the cost of software, installation, implementation, customization and training becoming a major deterrent factor for many SMEs, an open source application like SugarCRM (I am a big fan of this tool) and vTiger are also worth considering. These open source tools are free to download and are also easy to customize and implement.

Technology has always been at the center of CRM in practice. For some CRM worked very well while for others it didn't. Those for whom CRM did not work, did shout a lot and blamed the technology or even the concept of CRM, or the CRM vendors, or the users, or all of them.

CRM is not something companies buy. CRM is something companies “do”. Any CRM application is meant for companies to “do” CRM. CRM is also not a fad. It is an underlying principle of interacting with existing and potential customers and it is something all organizations should “practice”. All the employees of any organization need to understand CRM as a Corporate Strategy and not just another box bought in by the CTO.

Author can be reached at spbaag@gmail.com

This article was also publised at www.linkedpune.com/2008/06/crm-software-or-culture.html