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On the Roof of the World

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It would have been in 1981 or 1982 when it was reported in the newspapers that Piloo Mody, the brother of Russi Mody of Tata Steel fame and a member of Parliament, had negotiated a deal with China that would allow Indian pilgrims to visit Manas Sarowar and Mount Kailash. Hindu mythology posits that Kailash is the home of Bhagwan Shiv and Manas Sarowar is one of the 51 Shakti Peeths or centres for the adoration of the Divine Feminine. Access to these holy spots had been denied to Indians since the 1962 war but with hostilities easing, pilgrims would once again be allowed to visit. However tourists and pilgrims would have to be in groups and they would have to be escorted by Government of India officials. My friend, Abhay Maheshwari, and I immediately decided that we should go to Manas but we soon realised that the costs were prohibitive. Never mind, we decided then and there, possibly after a swig of Mohua at a Prem Bazar still, that we would start the process of saving for this trip. N...

The Box and the Tower

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Surath Chatterjee's Birthday Party The day began, rather early, with us kicking at his door, waking him up, wishing him HBD and demanding an instant treat. The fellow was rather disoriented and after some negotiation it was agreed that the Jilipi (or Jalebis) at PremBazar was the only edible stuff that could be procured at that ungodly hour! Some of us pooh-poohed the idea of riding all the way for just Jilipis while a few, possibly Rana Bhattacharya, vociferously liked the idea and nearly dragged Surath out to Prembazar. An hour later, Surath and the Jilipi enthusiasts came back to the wing to find the rest of us hanging out around the garden chair, that we had pinched from somewhere, and staring at Zakir Hussain Hall. Surath went into his room and bounced out immediately. "What's this?" He was pointing to a HUGE wooden box lying next to his cot. "Your birthday gift!" - evidently delivered when he was away. But there were no tags, labels or anything else on...

Telegram Tales

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1984 was not a very happy year for me. Even though I had successfully completed my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, the fact that I could not get a 'schol' or an assistantship at a US university left me in deep sorrow. My disappointment was even greater because I had scored a phenomenal 96 percentile in both Verbal and Quantitative sections of the GRE, and many friends with lower scores had made it through — but not me. Of course, I had admissions from many top schools like the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and even Cornell, but without financial aid, there was no way for me to go to the US. While I did have a job offer from ORG Systems, my Boro Mama advised me to join the PhD program at IIT Kharagpur itself, because in his opinion, a PhD was essential — a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead till today. Accordingly, I joined the Mech Department again under Prof. P. K. Nag in the Steam Lab to work on Thermodynamics. Here, I was remarkably ...

The Eighth Stanza

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 Adi Sankara's Shivastakam is a widely known and frequently recited hymn to Bhagwan Shiv. Howeve, I have noted that while the first seven shloks are remarkably similar across multiple sources, the eighth one is often different. What is even more distressing is that while the first seven have a beautiful rhyme and metre, the eighth one -- in almost all cases -- breaks the rhyme and displays a strongly discordant note. I believe that this is accidental. Since Sankara's Shivastakam was passed down as an oral tradition, it is quite likely that the eighth shlok was lost in transmission and different authors at different locations plugged it with their own creativity. Which is why, I as a follower and ardent admirer of Sankara, had tried my hand to create a shlok that I felt would have been similar to the other seven. This shloka first appeared in the First Edition of my book, the Road to Psingularity where I had been exploring the convergence of Vedanta, genetics and computer progra...

Morse @ Malanjkhand

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This would be in the winter of 1995 or early 1996, when I was the Product Manager for the DB2 Database product. At the time, DB2 -- along with other IBM hardware and software -- was sold and supported in India by Tata Information Systems Ltd (TISL), a joint venture between IBM and Tata Sons. IBM had been kicked out of India in 1977, alongside Coca-Cola, for failing to comply with FERA regulations. Now, nearly two decades later, the company was back -- in this new avatar. Two key people made this happen: Venky Raman and Dan Gupta. It was Venky who recruited me into TISL after I left Tata Steel, knowing I was perhaps the only person in India with deep DB2 expertise. Though my role was national and even pan-ASEAN in scope, I worked out of the modest IBM office on Harrington Street (now Ho Chi Minh Sarani), right across from the US Consulate in Calcutta. Still, I spent most of my time traveling across India and Southeast Asia, supporting customers in a mix of technical firefighting and eva...

Boiling Point

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This would have been sometime in 1993 when I was working in the Computer Services Department of Tata Steel in Jamshedpur. We had, after considerable effort, finally developed and delivered the rather unimaginatively named Jamshedpur Information System. This was a fairly comprehensive and integrated computer system that stored and processed commercial information  --  Maintenance, Accounts, Marketing, Production/Operations, HR  --  in a DB2 database on an IBM ES/9000 system running MVS. In hindsight, we might have been better off implementing SAP, but that is hindsight  --  and SAP was hardly known in India then. I had been very closely associated with the design and development of this system as the head of the database administration function  --  one of the elite corps of systems programmers  --  and had even travelled to the IBM training facility in Sydney, where I spent seven weeks learning about this new platform. Unfortunately, the...

Emergence in Time

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