blog@Yantrajaal

When we talk of India under seige, who do we usually think of as our beseigers ? The obvious culprit are the various terrorist outfits operating out of Pakistan, next in line is the Peoples Liberation Army in Tibet and then you have the various terrorist outfits operating from Myanmar, Bangladesh and of course the LTTE in Sri Lanka -- who were the first to create a maniacal cadre of suicide bombers of whom one was used with devastating effect against Rajiv Gandhi .... But if we think again, we will find the real culprits lurking -- or actually not lurking, but parading proudly in our legislative assemblies and in our administrative structure ! This has been reiterated once again with deadly effect in the murder of Uttar Pradesh PWD Engineer M K Gupta by the MLA of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the ruling party in the state ! And why ? because he could not provide Rs 50 lakhs for the birthday party of the state Chief Minister. With such enemies residing in our bosom who needs Kasav & P...

While we wait for Mr Ratan Tata to come out and present us with the Nano here comes news of a real nano-car that has been built -- but is not quite on sale as yet. These cars, created by Prof James Tour, Professor of Chemistry at Rice University, Houston, USA are approximately four nanometers across and includes a chassis with an engine, a pivoting suspension and rotating axles attached to rolling buckyball wheels, each made of 60 carbon atoms ! For more information see Computerworld or USNews for more details

Not one, but TWO of India's formidable enemies were in the newspapers today even though the Islamic terrorists and their assault on Mumbai were by far the most prominent. Politically correct readers would of course take offense at my reference to Islamic terrorists and would point out that Hindu terror also exists and that is precisely the point made most loudly by our pseudo-secularists that I want to debunk first. For the past couple of weeks the Anti Terror Squad is being used by the UPA government in a vain attempt to find these elusive Hindu terrorists who are claimed to be the most dangerous people in the country. I have no doubt that anyone who bursts a bomb and kills people is a criminal and should be punished. But when resources are limited the focus should be on the bigger problem !! Despite all claims to the contrary it is an indisputable fact that if you exclude the Naxalites-Maoists, then 95% all terrorist attacks in the country are carried out by Muslims with the acti...

All hail Vishwanathan Anand -- the undisputed chess champion of world. On a day when the whole of India celebrates and shares in Anand's spectacular win at Bonn, news comes of a czechmate of another kind and this is in a sense that is hilarious if not downright poignant. The rule of law in India as articulated by the police and the judiciary is shown up to be the sham that we in India know so well. When terrorists are exploding bombs all across the country and Raj Thackeray's thugs are beating up Biharis in Bombay who does our police jump on ? a Czech entomologist, Emil Kucera who is collecting insects in Darjeeling ! Ok, perhaps he was Chinese spy or a Pakistani terrorist in disguise but since no has even hinted anything like that it, is unlikely to be so. What is more likely is that fell foul of the law and local sarkari babu felt that this was too good an opportunity, to make money, to let go so easily. Had Emil been wise to the ways of the India he would have cooll...

Politics in Tamil Nadu has taken an unparalleled and unprincipled turn towards hypocrisy with the naked espousal of terrorism. For years India has been crying hoarse about Pakistan and its overt and covert support for the insurgents in Kashmir -- first of the indigenous JKLF variety and then the imported Jihadis of the Taliban, and just when the world has started to listen to us ... the Dravidian parties want us to do what we have been criticising Pakistan about !! The LTTE represents the most venal and vicious brand of terrorism that has menaced the planet -- they were the first to deploy a human bomb and have devalued the concept of motherhood by having their lady cadres conceive a child so that they can take advantage of their pregnancy to elude security checks while carrying bombs strapped to their bodies !!! Whether such depraved terrorists have a genuine cause to fight for or not is none of our concern. There is a democratically elected government in Sri Lanka and they are ...

Now that a motley menagerie of politicians that includes the apparent "leader" Mamata Banerjee, shadowy Maoists, the thuggish cadres of the ruling party and an utterly incompetent yet hugely arrogant political leadership have managed to drive the little Nano out of Bengal ... it may be useful to think back on events that have happened in and around the dying city of Calcutta. Folk wisdom says that it is the militant trade-unionism of the CPM that has led to the de-industrialisation of Bengal. Those of us who are old enough to remember the tumultous -- or anarchic -- 70s and 80s might remember slogans like "Tata Birla'r kalo haath, bhenge dao, gunriye dao" -- break and destroy the evil hand of the Tatas and the Birlas. And then there was the mindless opposition to computers : "Automation, rokto diye rukhtey hobey" -- Automation has to be stopped with bloodshed ! However, a close look at recent events would tell a different tale. Nirad Chaudhury had a...

In an earlier blog post I have written about Zoho Creator , the truly amazing platform for developing applications and deploying them on the web using the metaphor of Cloud Computing. I have introduced this platform in my Systems Engineering course both at the Praxis Business School as well as at the School of Management at IIT Kharagpur and the product has been very well received by students at both places. Management students who had in the past felt that programming was beneath their dignity ( though in reality it was more often beyond their ability :) have now started writing real programs. As a part of the course, the students have to develop a basic order collection application that has a few slightly complex concepts like referential integrity and updating multiple tables and to help them I have created a presentation that shows the various steps that are involved. Being an open source enthusiast I had created the presentation in Open Office but then I found to my dismay that ma...

The news that the Supreme Court is planning to introduce a fast track court for corporates who can afford steep judicial fees -- and in the process earn windfall income -- raises some very disturbing questions. Profiteering from the sale -- at high prices -- of scarce goods and services is referred to as ' blackmarketing ' and in India both the administration as well as civil society views it as crime. Jawaharlal Nehru had in fact wanted blackmarketeers to be hanged from lampposts and even today the government threatens to crack down on hoarders and blackmarketeers every now and then. Unfortunately, if not paradoxically, the Indian state is no stranger to this tendency towards blackmarketing when it comes to the delivery of its own goods and services. " Tatkal " schemes -- in telephones, rail tickets and gas connections -- are nothing but blackmarketing in disguise where those who are willing to pay a premium are delivered scarce goods and services ahead of t...

During the Second World War, the Allies had D-Day ! We in India were never so fortunate but the closest we could have come to that event was when we won the the World Cup at Lords -- exactly 25 years ago. India as a nation had been around for a long time, but India as a state had arrived ! It was our beachhead in the Global Arena ... yes there will be miles to go, but nevertheless this was where we planted our flag and showed -- not so much to the world, but to ourselves -- that, yes, we could do it. No one had yet thought of offshoring, outsourcing or that the world was flat ! Mittals acquisition of Arcellor or Tata's acquisition of Corus and JLR was inconceivable .. but even though we did not any of this -- nor did most of us suspect that it would turn out this way -- yet it was a defining moment : Yes we could, we would, and we DID it !! Where was I on that day ? At Goa, in the restaurant of Hotel Zuari having a single plate of biryani for the entire duration of the match ! Why ...

My students at the Praxis Business School are forever curious to know why I am such an ardent user of open source products -- particularly Open Office. If the whole world is using -- or is perceived to use -- MS Office, why is it that I have this aversion to MS Word, MS PowerPoint and MS Excel ? Of greater interest is their concern that by using -- and advocating -- Open Source, are they jeopardising their own career prospects in the software industry ? Will companies that thrive on selling software blacklist them -- at campus interviews -- if they are perceived to be too enamoured about Open Source. My response is as follows ... ................................................................................................................................... # We need to have a clear understanding of what is meant by Open Source .. 1. Open source is not necessarily free software. Actually the Hindi nomenclature is more explicit in this regard. Open Mukt, whereas Free Muft ! 2. Wh...

I achieved a major life-goal today when I managed to acquire a new machine which is completely free of Microsoft products ... Thanks to Financial Express and the Big Idea contest , I am now the proud owner of an HCL Ultraportable Notebook MiLeap .. and it was delivered today ... loaded with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution and the ease with which it became operational is amazing. I simply pushed the power button and the machine blinked to life. It offered me a choice of Ubuntu and DOS to boot up .. and when I pressed the Ubuntu option it asked me just three questions : my name (and password), my city / country and language. That was it ! Machine was up and operational !! I connected my Airtel broadband cable into the lan port and the machine sensed the network and hooked on. I fired up the Firefox browser and breezed into my portal. No problems .. not even with the bangla unicode font. I had to only download the Shockwave plugin to see some of my fancy stuff. Next stop OpenOffice .. whi...

Today's copy of the Economic Times carries two articles that, taken together, highlight the disastrous corner that India has painted itself into in the area of education, and then offers some hope of finding a path through which it could extricate itself ! If this is too confusing, consider the following : First, Rajrishi Singhal [ End License Raj in Education ] has very elegantly made the point, known to most of us in academia that it is the license-control mindset India's bureaucracy -- led by the last two, regressive and venal, education ministers -- that is at the heart of the darkness that has eclipsed the academic landscape. Jurassic institutions like the AICTE -- that insist that educational institutions cannot have a profit motive but must pretend, hypocritically, that they are charitable organisations -- have ensured that educational services cannot be delivered to the citizens unless it is through entities that are controlled by politicians. This includes both the Pub...

PanIIT in association with Infosys has embarked on a well meaning programme to get professors from the US come and teach professors in India how to teach effectively. Unfortunately they are missing the wood for the trees, or even if they did find a tree, it would be the wrong one that they would be barking up against ! Because you do not need people from the US to come and teach us how to teach ! There are enough people in India who can teach, and teach well, but the problem lies in getting them to teach. But why do good people not take to teaching in India ? The answer has been given out ad nauseum but since PanIIT has still not understood it, let me explain once again. A full professor at IIT, with 10 years of teaching experience, gets Rs 40,000 per month before taxes are deducted. Whereas a student passing out of the B.Tech program in almost any engineering college gets about Rs 20,000+ from day 1. So unless a person (a)has a separate and independent income that makes the IIT salary...

Star Ananda -- the popular Bengali TV channel from Calcutta -- has started an interesting bengali community at their website but the tool that they offer to write in Bengali is rather diffucult to use. I have modified the excellent tool that Deepayan has created on his website and have made it available as a widget that you can embed in your blog. Since Deepayan's tool is available on available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, i believe that i am free to use, modify and redistribute it with the provision that it is under the GPL again. If you want to embed it in your website use this code : This tool has been used to create the Sonartoree blog as well as to post in the Star Ananda website. It should work well with as long as your machine is unicode compliant. P.S. For a good collection of free, Unicode compliant, printer friendly Bengali fonts I would like to thank the good folks at Omicronlab .

I have always been fascinated by the possibility of high volume education delivery and the immense potential this has to transform the country ... without taking recourse to divisive tactics like reservation. My first attempt to articulate this was in 1999 when I participated in the CSIR sponsored New Millenium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative and proposed the idea of Shikshaajaal . The proposal, like most proposals sent to the government went -- i suppose -- straight into some bureaucratic dustbin. My second attempt was in the CII Eastern Region Meeting on Talent Management in 2007 where I delivered the keynote address and presented the idea once again ... but all to no avail. The distinguished delegates, had their lunch, dozed through the lecture and went back to their mundane existence. My third attempt was directed at Big Idea Contest that asked participants to send in ONE Big Idea that can change the face of the country and to articulate this in less than 50...

Mediocrity has finally triumphed over Merit. The Supreme Court of India -- led by the Chief Justice who has been a direct beneficiary of the politics of reservation -- has sided with our politicians and have declared that in India, the search for Excellence is over. From now on we should be in search of Irrelevance. The IITs and IIMs , that last, albeit shaky bastion, of the intellectual elite has fallen to the powers of the Dark Lord of Venal Populism ... from the depths of despair the citizen cries out What Next ? For all such anguished souls ... all that we can say is Take Heart. This is not the first and shall certainly not be the last ... Let us go back in time and reexamine the painful journey that the people of this hapless land have had to travel .. and how they have fared. Those of you who have been born and brought up in Calcutta in the late sixties and early seventies may recollect an organisation called Haringhata Diary, owned and mismanaged by the Government of West Ben...

The Internet -- as the TCP/IP backbone network -- has been around for a long time but the World Wide Web ( or simply the "Web" as we know it) really took off with Netscape. With its genesis in Mosaic / SpyGlass ... Netscape was the first icon of the fledgling Web and the Netscape IPO is very often taken as the first milepost in the long journey. That was the First Era, the era of Netscape. But Netscape was shouldered aside by the marketing might of Microsoft but strangely enough was not quite replaced by it. Despite trying so hard and with its flagship IE becoming the default browser by sheer brute force, it was not Microsoft but Yahoo that symbolised the Second Era. With Tripod, Geocities and other web properties under its belt, Yahoo was the big boy and the definitive icon. But like hot adolescents that grow into pot bellied middleage, Yahoo too had to give way to next emerging hotshot .. that is Google. The Third Era of the Web was symbolised by Google .. the icon of innov...

বাংলাতে লিখতে গেলে প্রথমে আপনার চাই একটি রোমান হরফ থেকে বাংলা হরফে ট্রান্সলিটেরেট করার একটি সহজ উপায় । এর জন্য আপনি চলে যান এই ওএব্সাইটে । অথবা এই ওএব্সাইটে । অথবা ওফ্ফলাইনে কাজ করতে হলে এই ওএবসাইটে গিয়ে একটি বিনামুল্যের ওযার্ডপ্রোসেসার ডাউনলোড করে নিন । মহাআনন্দে এই রকম কথা টাইপ করুণ । স্ক্রিনে যা দেখবেন কাট্-পেস্ট করে একটি উনিকোড UNICODE কম্পাটিব্ল ওয়ার্ডপ্রোসেসারে নিযে চলুন । । তার পর যে ভাবে সাধারন ইন্গরাজি ব্লগ পোস্ট করেণ সেই ভাবে নিউ পোস্ট খুলুন এবোন্গ নোটপাড থেকে আবার কাট্-পেস্ট করে দিন । এই বার সাধারণ ভাবেই পাবলিশ করুণ । দেখবেন ব্লগে বান্গলা হরফ দেখা জাছে ! যে মেশিনে ব্লগ লিখছেন আর যে মেশিনে ব্লগ পড়ছেন দুই মেশিনেই উনিকোড (UNICODE) ব্যবস্থা থাকা দরকার । সব আধুনিক কম্পুটরেই এখন উনিকোড থাকে সুতরান্গ চিন্তা করবেন না সব ঠিক কাজ করবে । একটু আধটু বানান ভুল হলে মাপ করে দেবেন । জয বংলা!

Long before there was Firefox, the browser, there was Firefox : the fictional Soviet cold war era fighter aircraft around which Craig Thomas had crafted a wonderful techno-thriller novel that had introduced the idea of controlling machines by thought. Twenty years later when I was writing my book on Vedanta the idea had cropped up again as I tried to reconcile reality with the idea of a maya or illusions . This was in the context of virtual worlds like Second Life and and it was my belief that these advanced technologies would one day blur the borders between the real and the virtual. But even while I was writing these, I had always felt that perhaps the usage of these technologies was way, way into the future and it is perhaps unlikely that I would get to see these being applied in my daily life. No more !! Given the rapid speed at which this technology is maturing I believe that we will see early versions of these technology being deployed in the next five years. Why do I say so ...

I believe I have found one of the most complete as well as easy to use Application Development platform. Why do I say so ? Consider the following features : A relational database for the persistent storage of data. A total GUI drag-and-drop front end forms builder with the ability to extend the logic with a scripting language. The database supports multiple tables linked through foreign keys and updateably both directly and from the application Easy integration with internet ( send mail ) and web. But the real icing on the cake is as follows There is NO SOFTWARE to buy and install. Both the RDBMS as well as the IDE are web based. The final application can be embedded into any website that allows Javascript. No support required for CGI / Perl / PHP whatever on your webserver. The entire service is currently FREE !!! and I really hope that it stays that way To see the kind of applications that can be built .... see Contact Manager Application or the Bank Transaction Application The two ...

Web 2.0 means different things to different people but perhaps the most authentic -- and original -- definition is given by Tim O'Reilly in his now classic articulation of What is Web 2.0. One of the key aspects of his articulation was the premise that Web 2.0 is less of technology and more of a platform -- or if you use the analogy of "Hindu" sanatan dharma, less of a dogma and more of way of life ! The word platform -- like the word architechure -- is widely used and abused in the world of computers. So to make things easier for us, let us first look at a more traditional platform : the ERP as implemented in SAP or Oracle. An ERP consists of a collection of applications developed using a one or more technologies. At the core there would be a database management software and on top of this would reside application, integration and presentation software. Woven into this is a set of business logic which in a sense should be common to or at least relevent to a vast number o...

We should be grateful to INTACH and HSBC for taking a very positive step to revive and rejuvenate the Strand along the Hooghly by organising the Prinsep Festival at the forgotten Prinsep Ghat -- that wonderful piece of architecture on the river. With the twin towers of the Second Hooghly Bridge towering in the background, it was a wonderful setting for the evening program featuring a very vigorous Manipuri Dance by Preeti Patel and an equally impressive interpretation of the Dasha Avataras in BharataNatayam by Bhanumati. Not being a dance critic I will not hazard a display of my ignorance by commenting on the quality of the presentations .. but from the perspective of a layman, it was a truly enjoyable experience. What was a little disturbing though was the immense ignorance about James Prinsep and the reason why he was honoured by his fellow citizens !! Neither the compere nor any of the other dignitaries had anything to say about the man who was the first to decipher the Brahmi Scri...