blog@Yantrajaal

The Constitution of India has been mutilated once again. This is the 104th time it has been done in the past 50 odd years and the purported reason is social equality. Reservations have been extented to private, unaided educational institutions. And who has done this ? People who, just a week before, have been caught red-handed on camera accepting bribes to 'act honourably' in their chosen profession. With custodians like this who needs enemies ? We have heard of the enemy in Pakistan, in China, in SriLanka, in Burma, in Bangladesh, in the USA, in the WTO ... we have also heard of commercial enemies that apparently trouble our commercial enterprises .. who outsell us in garments, in tea, in computer services ... we have heard of foreign trade unions demanding ban, or restrictions, on Indian programmers and we have heard of foreign trade bodies that seek to ban exports of Indian shrimps or put tariff barriers on Indian products. These are enemies we recognise and know how to deal...

Why am I obsessed with MMORPGs ? Because I firmly believe that MMORPG genre is the next big killer application of the same order of significance of Spreadsheets ( Visicalc and Lotus123 ... that took computers to every office desk ) and the Web Browser ( Mosaic / Netscape .. that drove computers into every home). An MMORPG is infinitely more fun ( despite sneers from the high-brow crowd) than the usual computer game because of the presence of real, 'intelligent' human beings on the other end. Actually it is less of a game and more of a community where you learn to find your way around a new world, much like what travellers have to do in a strange new country. The immediacy of virtual environment and the extreme richness that is possible is mind boggling. However building such a game is no child's play. You need complex game engines that deliver AI capabilities and then you have to add (a) graphics and (b) a compelling storyline. It is so expensive to build a game that it wa...

After years of reading about MMORPG Worlds, I finally managed to find a reasonably good one that allows you to play for free see ... Planeshift After a few initial hiccups with the software, I finally managed to create an account, create a character ( avatar ), upload it and finally join the game. It was good, though I understand that the popular commercial ones are better ... But as they say in Bengali, a blind uncle is better than no uncle at all. Jokes apart, joining this game gave me a fairly good understanding of what these games are all about. So what are they all about ? It is about a simulated world peopled by different races of people with each having slightly different characteristics. Is it not the same in our 'real' world ? In such a world, you have the ability to create one or more 'avatars' or characters and through them enter the world. Initially it is a very lonely place, as it would be if you were dropped into another planet and asked to find your wa...

Every year the Finance Minister tinkers with the tax rates. But let him also focus on the collection strategy. The income tax department is generally viewed with suspicion and there are many stories about corruption, extortion plus rude and irrational behaviour. Identical behaviour was the hallmark of DoT and the nationalised insurance companies. However there has been a sea change with the introduction of private operators in these fields. Both BSNL and LIC and it sisters are now far more user friendly AND efficient. Let us adopt the same strategy for tax collection. Let there be Tax Collection Regulator ( like SEBI, TRAI, IRDA ) and let it license multiple private agencies for tax collection in each tax circle. Each agency can be given a tax collection target and let them compete for 'business' from existing and potential tax payers. The finance ministry will set the tax rates and guidelines but the implementation will be done by these private agencies. Remuneration for...

Managerial effectiveness is a subject on which millions of words have been spoken and written about but there is sufficient scope to write a million more .. Here is my contribution to the evergrowing corpus !! A manager makes decisions ... If the decision turns out to be correct, he credits the team that has implemented his decisions. If the decision turns out to be incorrect, he takes the blame on his chin. Victory has a thousand fathers and there is no harm if that is the case, but defeat should not be an orphan. This inherent asymmetry between decisiveness and the consequences thereof is true not only in the field of corporate management but has a wider impact. In the armed forces or in the government, this reflects in the relationship between 'officers' and 'other ranks'. An officer takes decisions in the field and credits the team for success but takes the blame for disasters. However this analogy with government agencies is correct only up to a point .. because A ...

The recent judgment of the H'ble Supreme Court of India that in principle nullified the action of the Bihar governor dissolving the Legislative assembly but in fact could not give action to its own order because of the delay in passing the same highlights a fundamental malaise in the Indian judicial system. It is a live example of the cliched term : Justice delayed is justice denied. Millions of words have been said and written about the incredible latency in the system and the usual excuse trotted out is that there are too many cases to be tried and too few judges to try them. Why too few judges in a country of a billion people ? I will not try to answer that question here but shall propose a solution from a corporate management perspective. First judges ( and that includes magistrates, tribunals etc ) must understand that in a democratic setup, they are government servants and so are liable to be answerable to the public who are paying their salaries. Obviously the account...

Trams in Calcutta have a chequered history. While they are picturesque part of the colonial heritage, trams are often viewed as an impediment to the entire process of traffic management in Calcutta. On the other hand, trams have a charm of their own since they are non-polluting and are more people friendly when compared to the monstrosity of smoke-belching, ramshakle buses and the pestering annoyance the ubiquitious auto-rickshaw. However who ever has taken a tram ride through the Maidan area from Kidderpore to Esplanade would certainly wish that they could keep on going for ever and ever .. so delightful is the experience of breezing through the great open spaces. ... and that is the genesis of my suggestion. The Eastern Metropolitan Bypass is a vast highway that connects the emerging Rajarhat area to southern suburbs of Garia and beyond. Why not have a tram service that runs along this route ? Anybody who has travelled along this emerging corridor would see clumps of hapless people w...

Shape of things to come I was first alerted to the world of MMORPG by an article on Everquest ( one of the more prominent MMORPGs) that appeared in, of all places, the Statesman ... that was nearly five years ago and since then, the more I have read about this idea, the more it seems to me that this concept will play a very significant role in societies of the future. But before that, what is an MMORPG ? The acronym stands for Massively Multuser Online Role Playing Game .. but let us see what it means. In a standard computer game, a player assumes a role, say a combatant, or a race car driver and fights or competes against characters that are created by the computer program. Exquisite three dimensional graphics and intelligent computer programs have come together to create a very realistic environment ... and this is a cause of addiction to many dedicated gamers. In an massively multiuser online game, the player competes, not against a computer program, but against other other users on...

Peeping into the future to spot patterns is something that I have been doing for quite some time and before I forget, let me first jot down trends that I had seen and which subsequently revealed themselves to others. This is more to reinforce my own personal feel good factor. First the Internet itself. In 1996 I had quit my career in Database Administration to stake my fortune in the web, internet and what subsequently become known as eBusiness. Despite intense scepticism, I was the sole evangelist for the eBusiness practice of PwC .. a practice that subsequently became synonymous with all technology itself. Today, there is no information technology that is NOT eBusiness enabled. Within eBusiness, I had predicted the emergence of platform independent, browser based applications : based on the Universal Client. This is something that has become a reality today. I had predicted that corporate ERP applications would be web enabled to move forward into the eCRM space ( to reach out and...

Antarmahal (The Inner Chamber ) , a movie featuring Roopa Ganguly, Jackie Shroff, Soha Ali Khan, Abhishek Bachan and directed by Rituparno Ghosh was released in Calcutta over the weekend. ................................................................................................................................................... With Raincoat , Rituparno was merely boring but with Antarmahal he is positively insufferable. I have not read Tarashankar Banerjee's original tale but I do see the outline of an engaging story about a rustic, libidinous idol maker who fashions the goddess in the likeness of his patron's wife ... with catastrophic, if not humourous, results. Unfortunately, Rituparno has overlaid this tale with a nauseating story of a vicious and degenerate zamindar and his perverted craze of having a son at any cost. The result is crude, grotesque and painful. I have no problems with explicit eroticism or sensuality but the crudity with which sweaty, claustrophobi...

Images of our Durga Puja at Sonar Taree, Prantik, Birbhum have been posted at the Ananda Utsav website managed by Ananda Bazar Patrika of Calcutta. Follow the link given above.

AstroArchaeology & The Historicity of the Mahabharat School and college text books on Indian History begin with the Indus Valley Civilisation ( also known as the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilisation ) because anything earlier to that is considered non-proven or possibly un-provable myth. Hence the Mahabharata war, that shook the foundations of North Indian politics,has been consigned to the mysterious twilight zone between myth and history as has been the personality of Krishna, the foremost political figure of the time. The Mahabharata era has been notoriously difficult to describe in terms of traditional traditional historical'hardware' like pottery, ruins, coins or even physical manuscripts. However a 'software' approach can and does lead to very positive results. Software, as we all know, is independent of the physical media that carries it. Hence information encoded in software can be extracted, decoded and processed to yield interesting results. While extant ph...

What is it that represents the essence of India ? Is it possible for us to locate a core set of knowledge values and beliefs that define the experience of being Indian ? Is there a set of definitive landmarks that help us understand the contours of the Indian mindscape ? A few months ago an unknown filmmaker had released a hindi movie in India called Chaipani ... based on the theme of the eternal 'chaipani', 'baksheesh', 'ghoose', 'commission', 'cut' -- call it what what you want -- that is essential if you need to get anything done in India ... especially from the government. That is what set me thinking ... does Chaipani really represent the India that we know ? Perhaps not ... but then from another perspective ... perhaps it does .... let us see how C : C is for CORRUPTION that is nearly synonymous with India. Whether it is the Prime Minister or whether it is the not-so-humble peon, we all know that they come for a price and for not too high a...

Reservations of opportunities -- whether government jobs or college seats -- has become a national malaise. The idea was conceived in good spirit and as usually the case for any politically motivated activated, it has now generated into a thorn in the flesh of Indian civil society. Let us get the facts straight. (a) Years of reservation has had a very marginal effect on the overall rise on the standards of living of the scheduled castes. A few, clever and well connected members of these castes have derived benefits. (b) The national hue and cry that the political class has raised for preservation and extension of reservations is a cynical, opportunistic and immoral attempt to get into vote-banks. There is no second thought or ambivalence about it. When people like Mayavati & Lallu Yadav champion a cause, there cannot be anything faintly decent about it. (c) Members of the rational, civil society are unusually coy about calling this bluff, calling a spade a spade, because they hav...

The corporate landscape, which the Economic Times has been mapping faithfully for the past quarter of a century, has been changing over time. This is, perhaps, a reflection of the tectonics of globalisation but if we look closely, certain underlying patterns become evident. We will classify these patterns in terms of “equity” and see how ET, over the years, has related to these. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary [the only one that I could quickly access from my internet connected laptop!] defines equity as the money value of a property or of an interest in a property in excess of claims or liens against it. Used loosely, it measures certain qualities that impart value to an entity. So what is that intangible that adds value to a business ? 1960s - Financial Equity : This was the trader’s world. Access to capital was the primary ingredient for the success of a business enterprise. This was the age of the “general order supplier” or whatever equivalent name you would choose to use....

A little slice of a very important part of India's history heavily garnished with the sights and sounds of an era, two cameo love affairs and A R Raman's haunting music all add up to a wonderful and romantic adventure : but oh how I wish it was three songs shorter ! That would have given this otherwise fabulous movie that cutting edge ... an edge that has been blunted by the director's desperate attempts to cut into psyche of the semi-moronic Bollywood fan for whom anything without "item numbers" will apparently not pass muster. I will not sure how long this movie will run in the theatres and if Bose : The Forgotten Hero ( and film) is any indication, then I will be surprised if it crosses two weeks, but I would recommend this movie for anyone who has a love for India's past and is keen to sit through the passionate recreation of tumultous era. In addition to the obvious charms of the delectable Rani Mukherjee and the sincerity with which Capt Gordon ( To...

Have you ever wondered why administration in India never works ? Why is it that our electricity delivery network crashes every now and then ? Why is that our roads are never repaired in time ? Or for that matter they are dug up within months of being repaired ? Why is it that our disaster management is so amateurish ? Why is it that tax collection system is so leaky and extortionary ? The colonial 'exploiters' have left us to our fate more than 50 years ago and it is true that the colonial exploitation has been replaced by the exploitation of the criminal-corrupt but why is it that we cannot fight this cancer within ? Perhaps the cancer of corruption has gnawed us hollow but the most visible manifestation of this malady is the fact that we are ruled by incompetents. If you look closely enough you will realise that in most of India's institutions the people at the top -- or around the top, that is those who are in a position to take decisive action, are the ones who ha...

A book that falls short of my expectations. Perhaps my expectations were too high or that of the reviewers who had fanned my interest were too low or perhaps this is the benchmark of current Indian English literature .... you could look at it in any which way you choose. This is a book crafted in a workshop, not created in the crucible of imagination or ecstasy. It is meticulous no doubt, with the stamp of scholarship of someone who has had the luxury of spending a lot of time to do research on (a) the geographics and demographics of the Tide Country ( aka the Sundarbans ) and (b) the behavioural characteristics of the river dolphin. Good topics of research no doubt but hey I am interested in a reading novel, not a thesis. Coming down to the novel itself ....it is nice no doubt. Not much of a plot but more of a framework that the author needed to hang his twin theses on ! I like Fokir for his rustic simplicity but would have been happier if he could have raised himself out his mun...

But for the world-wide-web, the biggest innovation that the world has seen in the field of communications has been the ubiquitous cell-phone. From being a humble device to talk from the field, it has enlarged itself -- functionally -- to accomodate a diverse range of facilities : PDA, organiser, camera, music, web access .... and no one knows what next. However there is one aspect of the cellphone that is very troublesome : its need to balance size with functionality. As functionality increased, size increased and then technology advanced to bring the size back .... but there is a limit that is imposed not by technology but by human ability. The real pain is the size of the screen. How I wish I could not only browse the web but also open and READ files ... but to do so I would have to squint and strain and in the end it is simply not worth the trouble. So here are my suggestions for tackling this problem. 1] Delink the display ( that needs to be large ) from the 'machine...

There was an Engineer (Uncle SAM) working for Enron and taking a cool pay packet of US$ 10,000 per month. The work was hectic, even if it was for 8 hours per day for 5 days a week. He thought for a while and found out an Indian Engineer of similar profile in Bangalore, and recruited him to do his work for Rs 10,000 per month, and got all his work done by this person whom he paid from his salary (US$ 250). Thus, he made a cool take home of US$ 9750 per month and had all his time to play golf. He then got greedy, and took up yet another job with EDS (moonlighting?) for US$ 10,000 per month and subcontracted another Indian from Bangalore (using employee referral of the first Indian he employed in Bangalore), at the same salary of Rs 10,000 per month. This enabled him to play golf and earn US$ 19,500 per month. He continued this until one day, he realized that he had deployed hundreds of Indians from Bangalore on hundreds of his jobs and he made millions of dollars.......the rest is histor...

I struggled through this novel because it was referred to me as an introduction to what life in an IIT is all about and ofcourse the subject of IIT is always interesting to me. Unfortunately I came away with a dim, dark view of what I have always considered to have been the best part of my life. The book is a crashing bore, there is neither action, nor fun let alone anything profound and sometimes I wonder why publishers print such books and why readers buy them. I suppose publishers have to publish that is their raison d'etre. Coming round to the book itself, the protagonists of the novel Hari, Alok and Ryan somehow managed to spend four years in IIT without finding ANYTHING of any value. The teachers are bad, the courses are bad, the food is bad .. their friends ( other than the trio that is) are bad. Everything is bad. What utter nonsense. Unless things have changed dramatically since I left KGP (in 1985) or unless IIT-D is significantly different from the other IITs ... I am le...

You may be puzzled at the title of this blog so let me explain. Yesterday we were in Lolegaon where the temperature was a cool 13 Celsius when we started on the journey home. 9 hours later we were in Calcutta, via Siliguri & Bagdogra and the temperature was a sizzling 39 Celsius. That was indeed a very steep gradient indeed. Actually we had a very nice vacation in the hills. We took off last Saturday on the Uttar Banga Express, arrived at New Jalpaiguri next morning and took a Maruti van to Lava. Next we changed into a 4WD Jeep and climbed all the way up to Rishap. This is a rather primitive place but the service that we received at Pal-babu's Tourist Centre was fabulous. So was the room with the view (a rather cloudy view, though) and the overall ambience of the place. Best of course was the huge variety of exotic flowers that grow naturally there. After two nights in the quiet tranquility of Rishap we travelled to Gumbadara, a tiny village between Lava and Lolegaon with ...

Its Presence of mind and the right answer at right time that matters!! Q.How can you drop a raw egg onto a concrete floor without cracking it? A. Concrete floors are very hard to crack! (UPSC Topper) Q.If it took eight men ten hours to build a wall, how long would it take four men to build it? A. No time at all it is already built. (UPSC 23 Rank Opted for IFS) Q.If you had three apples and four oranges in one hand and four apples and three oranges in the other hand, what would you have? A. Very large hands.(Good one) (UPSC 11 Rank Opted for IPS) Q. How can you lift an elephant with one hand? A. It is not a problem, since you will never find an elephant with one hand. (UPSC Rank 14) Q. How can a man go eight days without sleep? A. No Probs , He sleeps at night. (UPSC IAS Rank 98) Q. If you throw a red stone into the blue sea what it will become? A. It will Wet or Sink as simple as that. (UPSC IAS Rank 2) Q. What looks like half apple ? A : The other half. (UPSC - IAS Topper Q. What can ...

Many of you would be aware that the two halves of the human brain have two widely different functions. The left half of the brain is used to handle the rational, analytical stuff : mathematics, planning, organization, while the right brain is engaged with emotional and instinctive tasks like arts, music, love and other passionate matters. Human beings also fall into these broad categories. Some are methodical, rational and people like these end up as scientists and administrators. The other category end up as artists, musicians and finally as mystics. What characterizes the second group from the first is that the latter are more often interested in the result and not the process of arriving at the result. They know ‘what’ but not quite sure of ‘why’ or ‘how’. Instinctively, they know whether something is good or bad but would not be able to explain why. On the other hand, the former are extremely insistent on reason and proofs. They refuse to accept anything that cannot ...

Lenovo has acquired IBM's PC division. This is a very big demonstration of the relentless economic pressure that the emerging economies of eastern asia have brought to bear on the productivity and profitability of western manufacturing industries. What was earlier evident in toys and clothes and then in components like harddrives and memory chips ... has now engulfed total systems and the companies that make them. And this has taken twenty years. What next ? The next frontier is services. Software services and business processing services. We are still in the era of the toys and clothes (body shopping ) and are rapidly moving into the equivalent of hard drives and memory chips (project delivery ). When shall we move in to acquire Accenture ? EDS ? Cap Gemini ? IBM Global Services ? Another twenty years ? or will the world move faster ? And who will do the acquisition ? Infosys ? Wipro ? TCS ? Let us wait and see ... These are interesting times indeed.

As India breaks free from the indignity of underdevelopment and shoots for the commanding heights of the global economy, the single most important engine that it needs is a competent workforce -- or to be more specific the quality of education that they have access to. Education is of course the responsibility of the government but like most other government responsibilities, it is never taken with the right degree of seriousness. So private participation in this sector is becoming increasingly important and we see a large number of institutions -- from engineering and medical colleges down to secondary and primary English medium schools -- that have emerged. This is fine in principle but very often the management committees of these institutions, much like traders of scarce commodities, charge high prices, compromise on quality and behave with a degree of arrogance that is extremely distressing for the end consumer. The obvious solution is to invite government regulation but that w...

Convocation Address delivered on Sunday, April 3rd 2005 at the College of Engineering & Management at Kolaghat to graduates who have passed out in 2003 / 2004 Friends … I am sure that you all realize that this is perhaps one of the most important days in your life. You and your parents have worked very hard and have made numerous sacrifices of in terms of time, money and the cost of lost opportunities – to reach this point where you will receive a diploma. By the Grace of the Divine Mother and through your own diligent efforts you are now an Engineer.. with a capital ‘E’. Congratulations. It is a day of great joy and rejoicing and I join your parents, your teachers and other guests in congratulating you on passing the second important milestone in your career. You may be wondering what the first milestone was .. it was your admission to this institute and I am sure that you recollect how happy you and your parents felt when that happened. I am also sure thatthere will be many mor...