blog@Yantrajaal

Truth is out there, but unreachable What is the rate of growth of India’s GDP? Some people will say it is close to 7% while others will claim that it is 4.5% with a 95% confidence interval of 3.5 - 5.5. Some will say that it depends on the base year that is chosen. A common man like me with no access to “real” data, whatever or wherever it may be, will have to believe someone or the other. Picture credit NYTimes How many people were killed in the recent communal conflagration at Sandeshkhali, on the Bangladesh border? Some newspaper reports say 7 or even more, while the others quote the police and say 4. Who were killed? The BJP says that its supporters were murdered by Rohingya intruders while the Trinamul claims that their supporters were killed by Bihari goons. Sitting in Calcutta, or reading this somewhere in India, one would never know what is the truth. You would have to believe someone whom you trust. But can you ever know whom to really trust? Most of us know that ...

Five Big Ideas for India in the 21st Century The hurly-burly of the elections is over and a new government is in place in Delhi. Ministers and their officers must be drawing up lists of the many urgent things that need to be done in the next couple of months. But there is a difference between what is urgent and what is important and it is more often than not that the urgent displaces the important from our schedules. In this article we explore five important issues that India needs to address, not just for the immediate gratification of urgent needs but, to set the agenda for the 21st century. From garbage disposal through restructuring of our education infrastructure that will in turn transform India into an artificial intelligence based space faring civilisation that is rooted in our Vedic past, let us explore five new narratives of Panchatantra/21. image credit Charity begins at home. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Before we set out to change...

Maximilien Robespierre might have fired the imagination of the world with his call for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity during the French revolution but the concept has been rather elusive in practice. Equality, in particular, has proved to be a bridge too far. image credit Let us begin with the Internet and the world wide web that was supposed to liberate the individual from the clutches of the powerful media barons. As one of the early pioneers and evangelists for this new technology, this author had created a portal -- Yantrajaal, a Bengali word that he had coined to define a network of devices -- in the same year that Google was born and seven years before Facebook. The general idea was to serve as a platform to share information on technology from an India perspective. In principle it could reach out to every corner of the world -- something that his earlier journalistic efforts in school and college had failed to do. But of course that would never be. Hardly anyone, othe...

In popular perception, skill in cerebral games board, like chess, are assumed to be a proxy for or measure of intelligence. This perception has motivated people to build computer programs that can play these games in an effort to make programs look intelligent or behave intelligently. But the reality is different. The complexity of decision making that a child, or even a dog, demonstrates while crossing a busy road is several orders of magnitude higher than what a grandmaster uses to win a game of chess. But because the act of crossing a road is something that we do every day we feel that it is somewhat trivial when compared to playing chess. Nevertheless  Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has enthusiastically used games as a testbed to try out more and more complex tasks that they would like computers to perform. image credit Programming a computer to play chess has been an obsession with many of the key personalities from the world of theoretical computer science. Nor...

In 2006-2007, in the early years of the Web 2.0 that emerged phoenix like from the ashes of the dotcom bust of 2000, Michael Wesch, Professor of Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University produced a video called “The Machine is Us/ing Us”. Prior to the emergence of Web 2.0, the world wide web was primarily a read-only medium to publish news and information to a passive audience. Web 2.0, with its focus on user generated content and a personal network of trust, created a read-write platform that allowed individuals to feed information easily into the system or “The Machine”. In the process The Machine learnt stuff that it never knew before. Wikipedia, one of the first Web 2.0 platforms, became the biggest repository of information, if not knowledge. This in turn allowed it influence a whole generation of students, journalists and web user, and shape the way they view the world. For example, this author who has studied in a Catholic missionary school, had had a great regard for Franc...

Credit rating is a big business. Thanks to companies like CRISIL and  ICRA and the research they do into the finances of companies, bond investors get an independent view of a company’s financial status. Then they can take a call on whether they should invest or not. At a personal level, the CIBIL score is a relatively new product in India and its value is used as a benchmark by financial institutions to determine whether an individual qualifies for a personal loan and if so for what amount. In all cases, the financial credit score, whether personal or institutional, is the primary determinant for access to loans or financial credit and by extension, to goods and services that are available on credit. In India, these extensions may not be evident but in the US and other financially mature societies, the financial credit score is used to allow or deny telephone connections or even rental of residential apartments. The utility of the financial credit score is well understood and it ...

The policy of the Government to identify and support Institutes of Eminence has generated controversy because of the inclusion of the green field Jio Institute in a group that includes the IITs. Whether the inclusion of Jio is correct or not may be debated elsewhere but let us first ask whether the IITs themselves -- and similar public sector Institutes like the IIMs, IISc, IISER and others -- deserve the “eminent” tag. Within India of course, their stature and allure is beyond question but one wonders if in the land of the blind the a one-eyed man has become the king! copyright free image from https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1448079 University rankings can of course be subjective and one may argue that our institutes serve a social purpose. However that is a fig-leaf that cannot hide the grim reality that shows up in the Times Higher Education Ranking of Engineering Schools, where IIT Bombay at rank 350+ is the highest ranked Indian school. Another, reasonably well-regarded, QS ...