blog@Yantrajaal

A book that falls short of my expectations. Perhaps my expectations were too high or that of the reviewers who had fanned my interest were too low or perhaps this is the benchmark of current Indian English literature .... you could look at it in any which way you choose. This is a book crafted in a workshop, not created in the crucible of imagination or ecstasy. It is meticulous no doubt, with the stamp of scholarship of someone who has had the luxury of spending a lot of time to do research on (a) the geographics and demographics of the Tide Country ( aka the Sundarbans ) and (b) the behavioural characteristics of the river dolphin. Good topics of research no doubt but hey I am interested in a reading novel, not a thesis. Coming down to the novel itself ....it is nice no doubt. Not much of a plot but more of a framework that the author needed to hang his twin theses on ! I like Fokir for his rustic simplicity but would have been happier if he could have raised himself out his mun...

But for the world-wide-web, the biggest innovation that the world has seen in the field of communications has been the ubiquitous cell-phone. From being a humble device to talk from the field, it has enlarged itself -- functionally -- to accomodate a diverse range of facilities : PDA, organiser, camera, music, web access .... and no one knows what next. However there is one aspect of the cellphone that is very troublesome : its need to balance size with functionality. As functionality increased, size increased and then technology advanced to bring the size back .... but there is a limit that is imposed not by technology but by human ability. The real pain is the size of the screen. How I wish I could not only browse the web but also open and READ files ... but to do so I would have to squint and strain and in the end it is simply not worth the trouble. So here are my suggestions for tackling this problem. 1] Delink the display ( that needs to be large ) from the 'machine...

There was an Engineer (Uncle SAM) working for Enron and taking a cool pay packet of US$ 10,000 per month. The work was hectic, even if it was for 8 hours per day for 5 days a week. He thought for a while and found out an Indian Engineer of similar profile in Bangalore, and recruited him to do his work for Rs 10,000 per month, and got all his work done by this person whom he paid from his salary (US$ 250). Thus, he made a cool take home of US$ 9750 per month and had all his time to play golf. He then got greedy, and took up yet another job with EDS (moonlighting?) for US$ 10,000 per month and subcontracted another Indian from Bangalore (using employee referral of the first Indian he employed in Bangalore), at the same salary of Rs 10,000 per month. This enabled him to play golf and earn US$ 19,500 per month. He continued this until one day, he realized that he had deployed hundreds of Indians from Bangalore on hundreds of his jobs and he made millions of dollars.......the rest is histor...

I struggled through this novel because it was referred to me as an introduction to what life in an IIT is all about and ofcourse the subject of IIT is always interesting to me. Unfortunately I came away with a dim, dark view of what I have always considered to have been the best part of my life. The book is a crashing bore, there is neither action, nor fun let alone anything profound and sometimes I wonder why publishers print such books and why readers buy them. I suppose publishers have to publish that is their raison d'etre. Coming round to the book itself, the protagonists of the novel Hari, Alok and Ryan somehow managed to spend four years in IIT without finding ANYTHING of any value. The teachers are bad, the courses are bad, the food is bad .. their friends ( other than the trio that is) are bad. Everything is bad. What utter nonsense. Unless things have changed dramatically since I left KGP (in 1985) or unless IIT-D is significantly different from the other IITs ... I am le...

You may be puzzled at the title of this blog so let me explain. Yesterday we were in Lolegaon where the temperature was a cool 13 Celsius when we started on the journey home. 9 hours later we were in Calcutta, via Siliguri & Bagdogra and the temperature was a sizzling 39 Celsius. That was indeed a very steep gradient indeed. Actually we had a very nice vacation in the hills. We took off last Saturday on the Uttar Banga Express, arrived at New Jalpaiguri next morning and took a Maruti van to Lava. Next we changed into a 4WD Jeep and climbed all the way up to Rishap. This is a rather primitive place but the service that we received at Pal-babu's Tourist Centre was fabulous. So was the room with the view (a rather cloudy view, though) and the overall ambience of the place. Best of course was the huge variety of exotic flowers that grow naturally there. After two nights in the quiet tranquility of Rishap we travelled to Gumbadara, a tiny village between Lava and Lolegaon with ...

Its Presence of mind and the right answer at right time that matters!! Q.How can you drop a raw egg onto a concrete floor without cracking it? A. Concrete floors are very hard to crack! (UPSC Topper) Q.If it took eight men ten hours to build a wall, how long would it take four men to build it? A. No time at all it is already built. (UPSC 23 Rank Opted for IFS) Q.If you had three apples and four oranges in one hand and four apples and three oranges in the other hand, what would you have? A. Very large hands.(Good one) (UPSC 11 Rank Opted for IPS) Q. How can you lift an elephant with one hand? A. It is not a problem, since you will never find an elephant with one hand. (UPSC Rank 14) Q. How can a man go eight days without sleep? A. No Probs , He sleeps at night. (UPSC IAS Rank 98) Q. If you throw a red stone into the blue sea what it will become? A. It will Wet or Sink as simple as that. (UPSC IAS Rank 2) Q. What looks like half apple ? A : The other half. (UPSC - IAS Topper Q. What can ...

Many of you would be aware that the two halves of the human brain have two widely different functions. The left half of the brain is used to handle the rational, analytical stuff : mathematics, planning, organization, while the right brain is engaged with emotional and instinctive tasks like arts, music, love and other passionate matters. Human beings also fall into these broad categories. Some are methodical, rational and people like these end up as scientists and administrators. The other category end up as artists, musicians and finally as mystics. What characterizes the second group from the first is that the latter are more often interested in the result and not the process of arriving at the result. They know ‘what’ but not quite sure of ‘why’ or ‘how’. Instinctively, they know whether something is good or bad but would not be able to explain why. On the other hand, the former are extremely insistent on reason and proofs. They refuse to accept anything that cannot ...

Lenovo has acquired IBM's PC division. This is a very big demonstration of the relentless economic pressure that the emerging economies of eastern asia have brought to bear on the productivity and profitability of western manufacturing industries. What was earlier evident in toys and clothes and then in components like harddrives and memory chips ... has now engulfed total systems and the companies that make them. And this has taken twenty years. What next ? The next frontier is services. Software services and business processing services. We are still in the era of the toys and clothes (body shopping ) and are rapidly moving into the equivalent of hard drives and memory chips (project delivery ). When shall we move in to acquire Accenture ? EDS ? Cap Gemini ? IBM Global Services ? Another twenty years ? or will the world move faster ? And who will do the acquisition ? Infosys ? Wipro ? TCS ? Let us wait and see ... These are interesting times indeed.

As India breaks free from the indignity of underdevelopment and shoots for the commanding heights of the global economy, the single most important engine that it needs is a competent workforce -- or to be more specific the quality of education that they have access to. Education is of course the responsibility of the government but like most other government responsibilities, it is never taken with the right degree of seriousness. So private participation in this sector is becoming increasingly important and we see a large number of institutions -- from engineering and medical colleges down to secondary and primary English medium schools -- that have emerged. This is fine in principle but very often the management committees of these institutions, much like traders of scarce commodities, charge high prices, compromise on quality and behave with a degree of arrogance that is extremely distressing for the end consumer. The obvious solution is to invite government regulation but that w...

Convocation Address delivered on Sunday, April 3rd 2005 at the College of Engineering & Management at Kolaghat to graduates who have passed out in 2003 / 2004 Friends … I am sure that you all realize that this is perhaps one of the most important days in your life. You and your parents have worked very hard and have made numerous sacrifices of in terms of time, money and the cost of lost opportunities – to reach this point where you will receive a diploma. By the Grace of the Divine Mother and through your own diligent efforts you are now an Engineer.. with a capital ‘E’. Congratulations. It is a day of great joy and rejoicing and I join your parents, your teachers and other guests in congratulating you on passing the second important milestone in your career. You may be wondering what the first milestone was .. it was your admission to this institute and I am sure that you recollect how happy you and your parents felt when that happened. I am also sure thatthere will be many mor...

New ArtWork "installed" at Krishnokoli in celebration of Holi 

I saw an advertisement of the Nokia 9300 and it floored me with its combination of a full functional keyboard … it is truly a combination of a cellphone as well as a full functional computer and that too a free of Microsoft technology .. who could ask for anything more ? Actually I do ask for something more … I want the phone to be smaller and I want the screen and the keyboard to be bigger … but that is an inherent contradiction. The only way that we could overcome this is to have a real laptop ( big screen & keyboard & all ) that is connected to a tiny phone through a USB cable .. but that too is rather clumsy. So here is my solution … Let us design a small PC-card style device that can accommodate the SIM card of the GSM phone. When I am in pure cellphone mode, for example, when I am traveling, the SIM card stays within the cellphone … and I use the cellphone. When I want to browse the internet, I pull out the SIM card from the phone and put in the PC-card style devi...

Though this is perhaps not the most important piece of news on the planet or even on the web, the fact is that we have just returned from our "place in the country" at Prantik. I hate to refer to it as Shantiniketan ... because that is what the Calcutta chatterati is always talking about .. being so very Rabindrik and artistic. For me, Prantik and Bolpur ( and of course SNK) is more interesting because of its proximity to the Shakti piths of Birbhum : Kankali, Sainthia, Fullora (Labhpur), Nalhati and Bakreshwar. Then of course there are the famous kali temples of Tarapith made famous by Bama-dev and Akalipur/Bhadrapur, the ancestral home of Nandakumar. Anyway, to each his own. We had a grand time at Prantik and the neighbourhood. We visited Kankali and Bakreshwar where we had a dip in the hot springs. I have a particularly strong fascination for Bakreshwar because of it very strong Shaiva links. The Akhshaya BaatBriksha ... a truly gigantic banyan tree that covers a a large p...

The "antardhan rahashya" or the mysterious disappearance of this charismatic and controversial political activist of pre-Independence India is a source of endless speculation. Let me add my twist to the tale ... The "official" view is that he died in air-crash in Taiwan while flying from Saigon to "who knows where". In the dying days of the Second World War when the world was in turmoil there is not enough forensic evidence to come to this unambigous conclusion. The conspiracy theorists believe that Subhas Bose fled to Russia and was held captive by Stalin at the instance of the British Government who did not want him back in India. This continued after India's independence because J N Nehru, the man who become the "king" of India after Independence did not want his erstwhile political rival to return as a pretender to the throne. He used his personal proximity with the Soviet leadership to keep Subhas Bose imprisoned in Russia and in ret...

The "left" honourable Finance Minister has been advised by the bureaucrat-babu's of his department to levy a fringe benefit tax on corporates .. and he has duly imposed it on us ... for he is an honourable man. But let us analyse the genesis of the tax, particularly when he considers foreign travel as fringe. No doubt our babu's view "phoren" travel as a fringe benefit. Never have these babu's ever travelled abroad for any worthwhile purpose. Tax payer money has always been used by these babus to visit "phoren" countries ... but never has any such travel resulted in a dollar of exports or a dollar of investment. It is always to see how other countries work, to learn how things are over there and so forth .... By extrapolating their own honest experiences, our babus have come to the conclusion that "phoren" travel is just another name for a "holiday" paid for by the employer ... in this case the hapless Indian tax payer. On t...

There are many, often contradictory, definitions of success of which the most obvious and in-your-face one is that which hinges on wealth, power and social recognition. And if we temporarily delude ourself and accept this definition ... then the next question is how does attain this success. It is very obvious that native ability, basic competence or any other natural attribute, has very little co-relation to success. There are too many incompetent people who are successful and there are too many very able folks who languish in the shadows. I believe that there are three steps to success. 1] Destiny or Divine Grace : is the first and the most important. In mathematical terms D & D is the necessary and sufficient condition for any success. 2] Perseverance : This falls in the necessary but not sufficient category. A lot of effort, painful effort, goes into the crafting a success story. and finally .. 3] Unscrupulouness !! .... another necessary but not sufficient condition. To be ...

Gayatri Yantra That is me ...

India's economic resurgence & the Gayatri Mantra Sorry if you have been misled into believing that there is some connection between the two items in today's heading but the fact is that the only thing that is indeed common is that I have been thinking about both for the past few days. First the simple stuff. What is the mystery behind India's current ecomonic resurgence ? It is kind of uncanny, the way India's economy is booming .... not only the software / ITeS .. but also things like construction, roads .... and other infrastructure. Who on earth is paying for all this ? How do we suddenly have the money to pay for so much infrastructure ? The forex reserves that are piling up belong to the shareholders of exporting companies .... not the goverment and certainly not the aam-janta .... who are in anyway struggling to survive. Frankly I do not enough about this. At a basic level I can translate India export led growth into (a) higher disposable income in the hands o...

Services Science : A new discipline One of the "Breakthrough Ideas" identified by the Harvard Business Review for 2005 is the emergence of a new academic discipline called "Services Science". This is certainly a very interesting and important concept because of two reasons. First "services" is something that is gaining prominence from a financial perspective as the focus of the global economy moves from goods ( or products ) to services ... and an increasing proportion of corporate revenue is being derived from the latter. Simply put, that which brings in the moolah is worthy of my attention. The second reason is that the definition of services is now expanding to include an ever expanding gamut of tasks. From pizza delivery to tax-return processing, from clinical design to hair stying there is a vast area of economic activity that falls into this category. This is precisely why we need to a theoretical basis that isolates the core essentials of this elusi...

What is panspermia ? It is a theory ( and process ?) which states that the transition from inanimate organic material to animate organisms is NOT something that happens in every planet or global society. Instead, it has happened ONCE somewhere and subsequently life forms are carried between galactic and intergalactic space either randomly or through the co-ordinated activity of sentient and intelligent agents. I had heard about this somewhere but it was brought home through a very powerful book that I read over the weekend. "Titan" by Stephen Baxter is a very powerful novel that talks about how human travel to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and then from there even further. What makes the book immediately current is the the fact that the Cassini-Huygens probe has just deposited the Huygens part of the spacecraft on Titan's methane and nitrogen environment this year itself ... and this forms a very integral part of the story. Wonderful ( though rather melanchol...