blog@Yantrajaal

The Basic Philosophy The solution to any real life problem consists of two components -- a hard technology component and a soft human component. While speeds of trains can of course be increased with more powerful engines, lighter materials, better aerodynamics and intelligent signalling, what we also need is a way to ensure that everyone in the railway system has a vested interest in ensuring that speeds and schedules are maintained,  is motivated enough to go the extra mile to make that happen and has the information at his or her finger tips to act on the motivation. This is the goal of TERM -- the Technology Enabled Real-time Motivation initiative. The Core  Idea Who is responsible for delays ? At the highest level, the Railway Board ! But we need to establish a more granular level of responsibility. Is it the signal operator ? the station master ? the staff of a particular station ? the staff of a particular group of stations ? of a specific division ? of a zone ? O...

Traditional MIS courses in Business Schools very often tend to focus on programming and systems analysis but the needs of the corporate world seem to be moving away from such "hard" technology. Today, it is all about the rich interactivity of Web 2.0 and the ability to "mashup" a whole slew of occassionally half baked ( or still baking ) technological ideas and deliver value to the business. In an earlier post, I had highlighted some of the "hard" technology of Cloud Computing that our students have learnt to package together to deliver a useful product. But there is more to the usage of technology than crafting smart applications. Today's managers are very often faced with the task of communicating complex ideas to an impatient audience and the only arrow in the quiver could be technology. Hence students were given the opportunity to explore the use of movie making as a technical tool to further their business goals. Students were asked to choose...

  When will people realise that there is a world beyond the corrupt antics that goes by the name of Cricket Image scanned from EyE / Indian Express

As a concept, Cloud Computing is neither new nor anything unique -- in fact the business proposition  around this model of system architecture is so compelling, that one wonders -- as I have explained in the Economic Times --  why people do not see it as an inevitability ! Of late the idea seems to have exploded into the public psyche with the unstoppable force of an idea whose time has come and we in the Vinod Gupta School of Management at IIT Kharagpur have included this into our curriculum. I have been exploring Cloud Computing on the Zoho platform for the past couple of years and this year our students have built some very smart applications -- in fact a nano ERP if I may say so -- that were evaluated by two executives from Zoho itself. I am grateful to Mr Aravind Natarajan for helping me with this evaluation. You can see the three top applications here on this page, or you can follow the links to the actual application <p><br /...

The Sandy Bay Hotel : Excellent place to stay when you are here. We booked our rooms here through Unicorn Travels in Calcutta . Morning 5th November 2010

This snake decided to pay us a visit, much to the annoyance if not terror of the inhabitants. If anyone can identify the species please add a comment.

Ten years ago I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion on the impact of technology on creativity and innovation at one of the Seagull book stores in Bhawanipur. This had been organised by one of the Bengali "little magazines" that Calcutta is famous for and on arriving at the venue my initial thought was that my invitation had been a mistake -- because almost everybody else was either a poet or a writer or an artist (though none were well known, then or even now ) and I was the sole C-programmer in a T-shirt in a sea of dhoti, pajama, kurta and tea cups. To cut a long story short, the discussion focused on how cheap technology -- mostly TV and cinema -- was destroying the great cultural canvas of books, painting, theatre and jatra and reducing us to mechanical robots and why -- horror of horrors -- pristine Shantiniketan and not the crass commercialism of Bombay or Bangalore should be the benchmark against which Calcutta should measure itself. I tolerated all ...

Every year, corporates have to spend a significant amount of money and management time to visit engineering and business schools and select candidates for recruitment. Competition for talent is intense at the few, well-known and popular schools and corporates are not sure of being able to attract the good students. On the other hand, good candidates are available at a large number of lesser-known schools but the cost of reaching, evaluating and selecting them is very high. The Campus Recruitment Exchange (CRX) could be to a way to avoid the these horns of a dilemma. The 12 Step Process Conceptually, the CRX is nothing but a labour market, where students will sell themselves to the companies that bid the highest, or offer the best opportunities in terms of pay and job profiles. However restrictions are necessary so that the normal rules of campus recruitment, like single offers to each candidate and the sequence in which students are allowed to interact with a company ( “day 1...

People should go to college for education, to learn,  but the unfortunate fact is that they do so for getting jobs. The net result of this situation is that colleges and universities in general and b-schools in particular continue to be obsessed with placements . Potential students, and those who 'honestly' advise them, and this includes the media, both print and digital, have a religious faith in the holiness of the placement data -- percentage placed and the quantum of solace offered -- and this data has a very high weightage in the rankings that are published every now and then. Curiously enough, the companies that hire graduates are less enthused with with placement data -- in fact they view this data with wariness and weariness because the better these are, the more they must pay and less sure they are of being ensured of a recruit. Nevertheless they do look at these rankings for the simple reason that the 'best' students would, probabilistically speaking, g...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ( ZAMM ) by Robert M Pirsig is an iconic book on philosophy that has developed a cult following since its publication in the late 1970s. It talks about a man who travels across North America with his son ( see picture above ) on a motorcyle and the description of his journey is interspersed with his discourse on philosophy. I was in high school at that time and did try to read it but failed to get past the first 30 pages. Today, nearly 30 years later, I finally managed to finish it and believe me ( unless you have read it already ) it is well worth the two weeks that I spent with it. ZAMM is an exploration of that elusive 'thing' or 'animal' called Quality whose presence, or lack of, is easily evident but a definition of which is nearly impossible. In his metaphysical inquiry into Quality, ZAMM shows that it lies not in Art nor in Science but somewhere in between, neither in matter, nor in the mind but again somewhere in bet...

Print on demand is a publishing process that allows an author to publish a book in paperback and then have a very small number of copies -- even a single copy, if necessary -- printed whenever required at a price point that is comparable to traditional offset printing. I had first come across this technology when I had published, The Road to pSingularity , and had explained this new publishing paradigm in a post in 2007 . The trouble then was that these print-on-demand publishers were based in the US and the price of the book was comparable to a US retail price which is quite high for us in India. Moreover the shipping cost was very often more than the cost of the book. Thus the whole process was not quite economically viable. However the arrival of of print-on-demand vendors in India have altered the economics dramatically. Recently, I had the pleasure of publishing the first volume of the VGSOM Management Monograph Series through Pothi and the results were very satisfying. A...

The Doors of Perception is an iconic book by Aldous Huxley where, while exploring  the hallucinogenic properties of certain shrubs and herbs, he came to the unusual conclusion that any cognitive sentient has instant and automatic access to all possible knowledge in the universe. However the neural faculties that are expected to process this information and render them useful in a socio-cognitive context are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data -- as occassionally evident in what we refer to as 'madness' -- and so are protected and isolated from the same by the mind that works as a gate or valve that reduces the quantum of information that the brain is eventually exposed to. This mind or gate or valve is what Huxley refers to as the Doors of Perception : that can be opened wider by the use of mental techniques ( Yoga ?) or the use of hallucinogenic drugs -- to reveal a greater amount of "significance" or meaning to the sterile ream...

Affordability and Quality Students located in remote and economically backward regions of the world are in critical need of good education and yet they are precisely the ones who cannot afford it. Since direct aid is both inefficient and inadequate , Shikshajaal:21 blends cutting edge technology and modern management techniques to  address this challenging goal. Shikshajaal:21 believes that educational services at the K12 level cannot be delivered through fully automated channels because kids would not have the interest or the ability to learn on their own. Human teachers, empowered with tools and technology, are essential. However, competent and motivated teachers are rare in the regions of the world that we wish to target. So the model  uses technology as a “force multiplier” that enables a large number of ordinary people – teaching assistants –  to deliver high quality education to a dispersed student population. The components of the Shikshajaal:21 architectu...