blog@Yantrajaal

2006 is the year when the idea of Virtual Universes went mainstream. Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) like Everquest has been around for about three years and three dimensional virtual reality, whether with physical devices or with technology like VRML, has been around even longer, but it had always been a niche market -- at best adopted in the gaming community. However with the advent of Linden Labs and the release of their SecondLife platform, the concept of a virtual universe has now become the defacto platform of the future. What the World Wide Web was in 1996 is what Second Life is in 2006 ... and this time, the rate of penetration and adoption is even faster. Describing SecondLife is an exercise of (a) redundancy and (b) futility. It is redundant because almost every magazine and journal has now described it in great detail and Reuters has a full time bureau chief reporting regularly from SecondLife. It is also futile because Second Life is an experience ....

As the year 2006 draws to a close, it is interesting to take stock of things that happened and speculate on how these will impact the year ahead .. and in this exercise the one single thing that stands out is SecondLife - The Emergence of Virtual Worlds. Milestones and signposts are seldom recognised when we whiz past them on the highway .. it is only when you have traversed some significant distance, do you realise how important that fork in the road was ... both for those who have taken the right fork and for those who were left behind on the wrong one. To appreciate, the enormous significance of this tectonic movement, one must go back to the year 1995-96 when Netscape went public and the Internet, for all practical purposes was born. The world had not been wired up as comprehensively as yet and we in India got wind of this techTsunami in 1996 when the first few intrepid cybernauts in India set sail on a voyage of discovery. It was voyage of discovery as well as a voyage of faith. V...

MMORPGs in general and SecondLife in general has now become a hot favourite with relatively large parts of the population. As a concept and technology it has few peers and there is no doubt it is at the vanguard of a new wave that leads to the 3D Internet. What next ? The clue lies in the word 3D ! SL is essentially a 3D world that avatars live in, but the limitations of the computer console / video display unit means that 3D has to be represented as 2D grid of pixels. But today, we have technology that can display artefacts in a real 3D format. You can look up the following websites .. http://www.sharp3d.com/products/ or this website ... http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2004/3d-display-cebit.html there are other technologies that support such technology .. for example see this http://www.seereal.com/en/index.php These are monitor based 3D technology which can enhance the SecondLife experience signficantly. Moving forward, laser based technology like the one from AIST...

PANIIT2006 - the mega IIT Alumni meet that is scheduled for next week in Mumbai has raised a lot of decibels in the media. There are a lots of articles and discussions on the IIT - the hype, the mystique and myth associated with India's best known educational instititutions. As an IIT-ian ( genuine B.Tech product - Mechanical, Azad Hall, Kharagpur) it is my misfortune that I would not be able to attend this megaMeet ... so let me share some of my thoughts on these unique institutions. At the risk of being politically incorrect, let me state upfront, that even though anybody who has enrolled in IIT is a dejure IITian, many of us believe that the defacto IITian is one who has qualified through the JEE Examination and has gone through the undergraduate ragging program -- does not matter if you were Mech or Chem or Agri or Electronics or Physics. The motley crew of M.Techs and Research Scholars do not qualify as genuine IITians .. despite their pretensions to the contrary. This may sou...

Google has a habit of coming out with extremely user-friendly and innovative products and I wonder if they could do something for distance learning. In the explosive growth of the knowledge economy, nothing -- bar nothing -- is more important than new and innovative ways of imparting knowledge. Google would do a significant service to humanity ( and perhaps to their shareholders as well ) if they could design a hosted, web-based tool to further this activity. The broad functionalities of my proposed system is as follows .. a] A hosted presentation server, that would allow a teacher to broadcast a set of educational slides over the internet. Streaming video is good, but we would need far higher broadband penetration before that can happen b] A white board ( or screen sharing ) application for the teacher to communicate to the students c] A way for students to join a particular session and a way to manage the interaction with students. A way for a student to "raise your ha...

Movie making lends it rather neatly in SecondLife. Here is a platform where you can create sets any which way you like and then you can populate the sets with actors and actresses who can be tailored to look just as the situation demands. So the same set of human 'actors' or manipulators can work with avatars who can take on any shape and size , including fantastic ones. The behaviour of the avatar-actors have to be defined in terms of animation scripts and this calls for signicant programming, but the best thing is that these animation scripts can be both reusable and incrementally improved. What this means is that while the first movie can have an avatar-actor who delivers a jerky slap that lands on someone's shoulder, the next version of the script can create a smooth slap that hits the intended victim right on the cheek ! And what can be done for a simple slap can of course be extended to any other action ... depending on the directors imagination. The 3D sets are of co...

A short movie set across three 'worlds', namely Planeshift, Real life in Calcutta, and Second Life that explores the boundaries of real and the illusory. Based on the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as articulated by Sankar, the 8th century Hindu philosopher, this movie seeks to explore the boundaries between the worlds that are thought to be real and those that are believed to be illusory. [ this movie may initially take some time to load, and the first pass may be jerky, but if you are patient, then from the second replay onwards, it is quite smooth ]

Now that SecondLife has taken on a life of its own ( pun intended ..) and does not need an army of enthusiasts to explain why it is so important to the world in the 21st century .. it is time to speculate on how it will evolve in the future. The parallel that I would like to draw at the moment is that SL is today where AOL was in 1993-94. There was a proprietory AOL client software that would connect over dialup lines ( low bandwidth SLIP/PPP protocols ) to the AOL servers and these servers would provide the 'space' for merchants and service providers to set up their commerce or 'fun' applications. What happened next ? The AOL servers were replaced by http based webservers and anyone could set up a website, not just AOL. Secondly the browser ( the universal client ) could connect to any web server and then it became a matter individual transactions between the server owner ( the www website ) and the client software through which it was accessed. AOL dropped out ...

China lovers in India, who can see no wrong with what the Chinese leadership does - whether brutal suppression in Tibet or staking claim to Indian territory in NE -- should please take note of the kind of repression that the Chinese government has unleashed on its own population. Grabbing land from villagers for a song and reselling it to urban realtors and industrialists is big business in India, but the Indian scams pale into insignificance compared to what is happening in China. Follow this link to get the latest update. What makes it even more easy in China is the complete lack of political and press freedom. While Indian politicians -- given that they do have to wear the figleaf of the Indian constitution -- have to allow a motley crowd led by Mamata Banerjee or Medha Patkar to have their say and the media has the right to talk about, no such luxuries is allowed in China. If you dare to protest, first you are shot and then that news is wiped off the face of the earth ... ex...

The communist government in Bengal is facing intense resistance from farmers in their attempt to convert prime agricultural land for industrial use. Allegations of scams and an unholy nexus between party activists and unscrupulous realtors are being flung around every day. Such conflicts however are very common in China but news of such conflicts are generally suppressed by the media there. One such incident has happened recently in Guandong province and has been reported by the BBC

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms, which generally make semantic and syntactic sense but sometimes could add up to what is truly impossible -- like the "horns of the hare" or the "child of a barren woman". Looking at the title of this post, the reader, may be led to believe that the the author is exploring oxymorons of the latter variety. But nothing could be further from the truth. Having spent a week in Birbhum, where Santiniketan happens to be, I have come to the conclusion that a Tagore-free Shantiniketan is not only possible but perhaps could be very desirable as well. But before I begin let me admit upfront that I do know very well that unsolicitated advice is extremely irritating and it becomes even more intolerable when the advice is (a) unequivocally correct and -- this is worse -- (b) is directed towards individuals ( or groups) who steadfastly claim to be know-alls and hence by extrapolation do not need advi...

based on an article by Devdatta Kali The Adoration of the Durga is the biggest and most popular festival in Bengal and coincides with Sharad Navaratri that is celebrated in the rest of Hindu India. The celebrations kick off from Mahalaya, the last day of the first dark fortnight of Ashvin, when Hindus recall and honour their ancestors. Mahalaya is associated in the popular Bengali psyche with a radio program produced by Birendra Krishna Bhadra for All India Radio, where the the Devi is symbolically invoked. This program is a combination of devotional songs and readings from the Chandi - a text that is revered by those who believe in the Divine Feminine or Shakti. For many of us, the radio program serves as a nostalgic reminder of a long vanished youth but very few of us have explored the mystical message of the Chandi. This article is an attempt in this direction. According to legend, Durga sat on the tip of a needle for nine days, doing a severe penance to destroy the evil Asura ...

1. I revere the Mother ! The Mother Rich in waters, rich in fruit, Cooled by the southern airs, Verdant with the harvest fair. 2. The Mother - with nights that thrill in the light of the moon, Radiant with foliage and flowers in bloom, Smiling sweetly, speaking gently, Giving joy and gifts in plenty. 3. Powerless ? How so, Mother, With the strength of voices fell, Seventy millions in their swell ! And with sharpened swords By twice as many hands upheld ! 4. To the Mother I bow low, To her who wields so great a force, To her who saves, And drives away the hostile hordes. 5. You our wisdom, your our law, You our heart, you our core, In our bodies the living force is thine. 6. Mother, you're our strength of arm, And in our hearts the loving balm, Yours the form we shape in every shrine. 7. For your are Durga, bearer of the ten-fold power, And wealth's Goddess, dallying on the lotus-flower, You are Speech, to you I bow, To us wisdom you endow. 8. I bow to the Goddess Fair, Rich in...

Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) are something that I have been writing about extensively in my other blog the-Imagineer . However the posts in that blog address the technological and economic aspects of this emerging phenomenon. Here I wish to explore the philosophical implications. But before I attempt to link MMORPGs to Vedanta, let me state clearly upfront that I am not one of those who believe, and try to convince everyone else, that all technology that we see today was known and available to ancient Hindu society. While I am not a pseudo-secularist who revels in trashing each and every aspect of Hindu civilisation, I am also equally sceptical of wild claims about the usage of airplanes in the Ramayana and of nuclear missiles in the Mahabharata. And in particular I have no love lost for Vedic mathematics ... that collection of simple formulae and mathematical shortcuts that have been erroneously compared to the wonders of Euclid and Pythagoras. What I do hav...

All students and enthusiasts of the History of the Motor Car are aware of the Red Flag law that was in effect in England in the closing years of the 19th century. This was the time when engineers were making the first hesitant attempts to put a steam engine on a horse carriage to see if they could make a self-propelled vehicle that was both light enough to move and yet safe enough for the passengers ... and there were many ideas that were explored. Engineers in England, as well as in France, Germany and other industrialised nations were carrying out various experiments to study different options ... with different degrees of technical and commercial success. But England was the only country where the legislature -- that is Parliament -- had unilaterally and ignorantly mandated that self-propelled vehicles were a danger to the population and hence should they venture out on public roads, they had to be preceded by a man, walking in front, with a red flag. This arbitrary piece of ...

Is SecondLife a pre-cursor to a new version of the world wide web ? Let us take a close look at how SecondLife is very similar ( or dissimilar ) to the web in general. The web is one of the many applications ( like chat, smtp-mail, ftp ) that runs on the IP infrastructure of the internet. Of course it is the most popular application. SL is also another application complete with a client and a server. The web consists of websites ( or groups of websites ) that individuals build and hope to draw traffic to. SL consists of islands, regions and individual 'properties' that people build and hope to draw traffic to. On a website, you can do various things .. make it 'beautiful', both visually as well as with music etc, to increase its attractiveness. You can also enable your website to hold chat sessions, or enable it with eCommerce to transact business. Properties and regions on SL can also traverse the same path. They can initially be simply 'beautiful' places to be...

Yesterday was a red letter day in my exploration of Virtual Worlds when I participated in a real company meeting inside SecondLife , an MMORPG that has been featured in BusinessWeek magazine. When the Lotus Notes meeting invite arrived from an unknown US colleague, I had been put off by the unearthly 1:00 AM in the night ? and then I looked closely at the venue and was taken back to read location @SecondLife !!! This was so intriguing and exciting as well that I immediately suspended my self imposed curfew on conferance calls after 9:00 PM and accepted the invitation. Fortunately I had an avatar in SecondLife ... though it was a very rudimentary one. Basic male(!) with bare minimum clothes and through him I entered SecondLife at the appointed hour and teleported myself to the location that my company had set up. And wow ! what a simulation ! Full 3D conferance room with attached lounge. Company posters on the walls, standard powerpoint presentations running on the screen. It was a b...

The millions words of criticism that have been written to condemn the illogical, ineffective and downright detrimental ban that the Government of India sought to place on accessing certain websites ( and associated domains )are HARDLY ENOUGH to assuage the feelings of extreme outrage that has been felt by the internet community in India. Those who are internet-illiterate, and that would include a large percentage of the Indian bureaucracy, cannot ever hope to understand the feeling of helplessness, anguish and despair that those of us, who choose to live in cyberia for a large part of the day, had experienced. It is similar to cutting of both the daily supply of newspaper and access to the local transport system !!! Good thing is that finally public opinion has been strong enough to modify government policy and the blogs are back again ... but what about geocities ? Most of today's bloggers may not be aware of geocities, but those of us who had started builing websites in the seco...

I saw the movie last Friday and the first thing that struck me was the amazing stupidity of the reviews that were penned by the critics at Cannes after the premiere on 19 May. Apparently they found it ridiculous and funny and some of them broke out laughing ... well, we in Bengal have a saying that the fool laughs thrice - once without understanding, once because everyone else is .. and finally when they understand the joke. Unfortunately neither this movie, nor the book that it is based on is a joke .. so now that these idiots have had their last laugh ...it is time for us to move on without paying these jokers @ Cannes any further attention. Having got that piece of venom out of my spleen, let me turn to the movie. It is a very faithful reproduction of the book but you must have read the book well to make sense of the movie. Unfortunately the vast majority of people with whom I shared the movie hall had possibly not read the book ... and so to most of them, it seemed as if they were...

The "Gayatri" Mantra is actually a misnomer. Perhaps it should be called the Savitri Mantra, that is sung, or chanted, in the Gayatri metre. But irrespective of the name that we use to refer to it, it is fact that it is the most significant string of characters that is central to the Hindu way of life. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Kamaksha to Kathiawar, this is one set of words that are universally recognised and held dear by the Hindu population or at least the scholarly and priestly class. It is of course a different matter that this string of characters is almost impossible to translate into English or even any other Indian language. The syntax, the sequence of nouns and verbs, incredibly archaic ... and yet for those who can feel its throb in the echoes of the heart it is quite clear and lucid ... but of course inexpressible in a language other than the native Sanskrit. I found this translation, which is first literal and then allegoric, to be the closest to what it ...

Most of us are familiar with the word agnostic but are slightly unsure of Gnosticism, so let me first explain the genesis of the word. The word gnosis derives from Greek and 'means' knowledge or the act of knowing. However this knowledge is different from rational, logical knowledge -- as is obtained by reading books or listening to a guru -- and instead refers to a form of knowing obtained by experience or perception. In this respect it bears an uncanny resemblance to the revelation or enlightenment that is experienced by Eastern mystics, which is different from the 'bookish' knowledge obtained by reading the Vedas or the Upanishads. The ascent of Kundalini in Tantra and the 'flash' of revelation that it brings to the sadhak is also an example of gnosis. Ramakrishna blessed many of his disciples by stating : Tor Chaitanya Hok - which may be translated as May You Be Aware Of, or, May You Realise (the Truth). In the first century after the appearance of Jesus Chr...