blog@Yantrajaal

I have been a laggard with smartphones but last month I finally bought an Android phone and within days I got a tidy return on my small investment -- two extra hours on the upper berth of an overnight train ! How ? If you are travelling alone at night, in an AC compartment then you have no way to knowing where you are at any point in time and the need to climb down every now and then to check the station that you are passing through is painful. Instead what I did was to lie on the bunk and switch on Google Maps on my GPS enabled Android phone and watched the blue arrow that showed me (and the train) as it snaked across the countryside. Only after passing the last station before my destination, did I finally get down from bunk feeling rather smug about this new technology. This simple technology can be used to track the movement of all trains across the entire country. How ? Every Android phone is associated with a specific Gmail ID and using this Gmail ID one can “check-in” i...

Chandidas was one of the most well known poets of medieval Bengal and his SriKrishna Kirtan -- a lyrical account of the story of Radha and Krishna -- is an iconic milestone in the growth of development of the Bengali language. Yesterday, we had the pleasure of visiting Nanoor, in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, where Chandidas was born. Here are some pictures.   The road leading to the ancestral house of the poet. The modern gate carries one of the poet's ringing assertion of humanism -- above all, it is in humanity that one can find the essence of all truth.     The Archaeological Survey of India assert the authenticity of the relics that are now associated with the poet.   A terrocotta Shiva Temple   The small, non-descript temple of Bishalkshi or Basuli Devi whom the poet adored in the form of Saraswati, the Patron Goddess of Literature and the Fine Arts  Two pictures (above and below ) of the m...

DSC00001 - The first shot

Government funded institutes and colleges in India are certainly far from being in the pink of health. Even the premier institutes of technology and management fall far short of international standards but if one were to say so in public, as only well known people like Narayan Murthy and Jairam Ramesh can afford to do, he or she will be mocked, humiliated and shouted down. But why do we say this ? The fame of the IITs and IIMs rests neither on the faculty nor on their research output but on the students and alumni.  In fact the only real value that these institutes bring to the table is the rigour of their admission process, namely the JEE (now discredited because of coaching classes and being discontinued ) and the CAT. Not much value is added after that. In terms of research, the less said the better. Even a cursory investigation into this unfortunate state of affairs will reveal that the real problem is the poor state of the underlying management and administrative mechanism ...