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...