blog@Yantrajaal

In an earlier post, " First Look at a New Currency ",  I had written about my hesitant entrance into the world of the Bitcoin economy and today, the Economic Times has an article that shows that even the regulatory bodies in India have started to have a point of view on this strange and disruptive technology. Since then, many people have been asking me about this piece of technology so let me take a stab at trying to understanding this currency that has appreciated from just US$ 200 to US$1000 in the space of just one month. First question : What has caused this sudden jump in the value of Bitcoin ? Well the answer is that US Regulatory agencies have declared that there is nothing inherently wrong or illegal with the usage of this currency and the US cannot fall behind the rest of the world, and particularly China, in adopting this new technology. This has set off a flurry of trading activities that has resulted in this huge increase in the price. Second question : Is...

Many young and energetic graduates from our premier institutes of learning have of late decided to opt-out of the placement services that these institutes provide to become entrepreneurs and set up new businesses. A recent slideshow-report by the Economic Times, features 10 such cases where students of IITs, IIMs and BITS Pilani have created a string of successful businesses. Prima facie this is an excellent development and we wish that many more students create many such enterprises but a closer look reveals some disquieting trends that may be worth a little more discussion. Seven of the ten businesses featured -- and these include well known names like Flipkart and Redbus, were about a service delivered out of a website. This includes monitoring school kids, booking of taxis, buses and trips, selling of goods and services over the web. Two were focused on building a software that facilitate phone calls over the web and the tenth was about building a robot. In all of these busines...

A species evolves when some of its members acquire some characteristics that gives them an advantage in the competition for resources, a characteristic that makes them more "fit to survive" in a hostile and adverse environment. From this perspective, the appearance of language in the animal world was a watershed moment in the ascent of man.  It may not have happened overnight but the emergence of this unique ability   to capture fleeting perceptions and experiences as concepts and ideas in a matrix of grammar and vocabulary and then transmit them for debate and discussion gave such huge evolutionary advantage to those apes who acquired this ability that in effect a new society was born. Language was a very unique skill -- a skill that allowed one to acquire, modify, transmit and disseminate knowledge and information about other skills like hunting, cooking, farming and building shelters. It did not matter which skill was important for survival, a language to talk about...

 I spoke about this unique concept at the Technology Forecast Conference organised by PricewaterhouseCoopers Ltd in Calcutta on 26th September 2013 at the Hyatt. At the end of the presentation, I asked members of the audience to send me an SMS and  vote on whether they thought that there would be an internet of human minds in the next 50 years. 16(+1, added later) people voted YES, 6 people voted NO.

The Kedarnath Temple that was nearly destroyed in the recent natural calamity has now been thrown up to the public again but a lot of reconstruction and rehabilitation has be done to bring this tiny temple town to its pristine glory. We had been to Kedarnath and Badrinath in 1997 and here are some ancient pictures that are in our treasured memory. notice the snow in the courtyard of the Kedarnath temple and this was June-July. This was the Bharat Sevasram Sangha guest house or dharmashala that we stayed in. After the stiff Kedarnath trek, we had some rest at this beautiful tent colony and Nandaprayag, right next to the rushing Alakananda River Next stop was Badrinath the soaring Neelkantha Mountain ............................................................................................................................. and here are a few more pictures from this trip Karnaprayag Lachchhmanjhoola ...

MBA programs in India, and perhaps abroad as well, are at the crossroads. While the top 3 IIMs may be comfortably placed with their placement story, students of other B-Schools in the country are in a state of tension -- will they or will they not be placed in a job of their choice ? In this post, we explore how the famous German system of Dual Vocational Training (TVET) can make an MBA program more meaningful for corporates, students and for the teaching institution. As I have argued in another post, B-Schools and the Placement Syndrome , placements are the only reason why B-Schools exist ! We may talk about research in management and of papers  being published in respected journals like Management Science but 99% of B-School students, the primary customers who actually pay for the faculty and the infrastructure, do not really care about such stuff. To them, the reputation of a B-School depends on the percentage of the graduating batch that is placed and the average salary ...

at the Public Relations Society of India, Kolkata Chapter, annual event at the ITC Sonar, Calcutta on 22nd June 2013, where I spoke about Personal TV Channels

I know that Social Media is the toast of the town but boy, am I getting tired of it ! You may say that I am being a hypocrite, since I post regularly on Twitter (hence automatically by  passthrough on Facebook ) and Linkedin, but I will be frank and admit that I do so more out of habit and perhaps out of a misplaced sense of necessity. Habit is understandable. At Level 4 of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one needs esteem, the acceptance by one's peers and it does give you a kick if your post is liked and commented upon by a small band of people who form a mutual appreciation society. Of course, the key word in the last sentence is mutual -- if you want your posts to be liked and commented upon, then you have to return the favour as well and this is where the habit part kicks in. But other than casual chit-chat or  twitter (the guys who created this phenomenon, could not have named it any better) I doubt if social media has any purpose other than to keep an idle mind busy ! ...

Today, on Facebook, I came across another wisecrack comment on the dim prospects of the Indian software industry. Someone was taking another cheap potshot at Infosys ( and similar IT companies for that matter ) for working at the low end of the value chain. Coding, cyber coolies and what not. Why can the Indian software companies not "move up the value chain" and develop products that leverage intellectual property and not merely cost arbitrage ? Good question. And it is not that this question is being asked for the first time and so it is unlikely that the issue is not known to the management of the IT companies. Having been at a reasonable senior position in the IT industry I know for sure that many of my colleagues and contemporaries were seized of the matter. But being seized of the matter is different from being able to do something about it and unfortunately most attempts to do anything different ended up in failure. Why ? Because we as a nation suffer from an unbe...

Bitcoin is a new "currency" that has caught the imagination of the world and I thought it may be worthwhile to step in and see what it looks like. But before that what is Bitcoin ? A Google search on the topic will lead to lots of fairly detailed explanations but let me summarize what I have understood so far. It is more like a commodity, like gold or guar seeds, that are being traded at a price dictated by the demand and supply in the market. Since it is a digital artifact, it is being "mined" or "created", by running a computer program -- that consumes time, power and CPU cycles -- and seeing if the result meets certain requirements. Think of it as if you are asked to locate the next prime number. These requirements are defined "collaboratively" by a federation of computer servers located on the internet. So unlike a Central Bank there is no single body that controls the supply Bitcoins. Anyone can join this federation by installin...

Gangani is an unusually picturesque place on the banks of the Shilabati River, near Garhbeta, West Midnapur, West Bengal. Here erosion by water has created strange earth and rock formations on the banks of the river and the red colour of the soil gives the place an eerie look. The following slide show will help explain what we are talking about. Some people refer to this place as the Grand Canyon of Bengal but of course in terms of size, the place is miniscule compared to the original in the US. This is what the place looks like in Wikimapia

Students today are trapped in a strange dilemma precipitated by disturbing trends. One hand we have the devaluation of the college degree as more and more employers are demanding college degrees for jobs that essentially call for high schools ( see New York Times ) and on the other we have colleges rising exponentially and leading to a second debt crisis. ( See Time ) This may be a new phenomenon affecting the United States but has been a well known problem in the dismal economic scenario in poorer parts of the world. In India we have had the tragedy of graduate and even post graduate students fighting over janitorial opportunities in the arid job market while thousands of students never have the wherewithal to continue their studies beyond high school ( Class XII) or even middle school (Class X) In the gloom that is gathering over the global economy it is the student and the education system that is finding itself trapped in a cul-de-sac that seems to be leading nowhere in general ...