blog@Yantrajaal

Saleem Shahzad's book ("Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban", Pluto Press, 260 pages, available at Flipkart ) is a must read for anyone who is concerned about Islamist terrorism and an eye opener for the student of the murky politics beyond our western border. Going beyond the wealth of information that it presents, what is most remarkable about the book is the frank, no-holds-barred candour with which he presents his point of view from a near first person perspective and had he not been killed after the publication it may have been difficult to believe all that he has said. But his unfortunate murder – in the hands of those whom he had talked about – puts a seal of authenticity on the events, dates and characters that are described in the text. Most of us in India believe that Islamist terrorism – from Kashmir to Mumbai and elsewhere – is the handiwork of  the all powerful Inter Services Intelligence unit, the ISI, of Pakistan and is nurtured in and unleashed from terror...

The new minister for  higher education in West Bengal is exploring new ways in which this sector could be improved. Here are some ideas. image of Class XII girls borrowed from Indian Patrika There could be many ways to improve the quality of higher education in Bengal. Curriculum can be redesigned, faculty can be trained or the administrative structure of universities and colleges can be changed. But without ignoring these traditional approaches, can we look for some radical, out-of-the-box ideas that could catapult Bengal to an eminent position of thought leadership ? To do so, let us begin by admitting that there is no dearth of colleges in Bengal but students do not perceive them to be very useful. This is because of (a) the poor quality of faculty and the educational services that they deliver that in turn leads to (b) the meagre job opportunities that that await students who pass out. This note explores low-cost, technology enabled approaches that can help mitiga...

Given the current confrontational mood between industry and agriculture in the matter of acquisition of scarce land for industrial development it is imperative that we look at totally new or untried models. But before we do so let us first define some boundary conditions -- the Lakshman Rekha -- that cannot be transgressed. No land must be taken by force even by invoking the principle of Eminent Domain by the State unless it is to  be used for a clear public purpose. Land for industry does not fall into the category of public purpose. Land owners, farmers or otherwise, must be paid fair market rates and must be allowed to benefit from the appreciation of prices Industry must not be penalised by extortionary, black mail practices when they decide to move into a region and seek to acquire land for legitimate economic purposes. The role of the Government is to kept to a very minimum since there is no guarantee against a move by politicians and bureaucrats to bend rules and make m...

A decade and a half ago, in the early days of outsourcing of software development, when clients in the US were sceptical about the feasibility of teams working across vast distances we had coined a term : Geography is History. What we meant to say was with the rapid advances in communication and collaboration technology, the geographic location of members of dispersed teams did not matter any more and dispersed organisations could be as productive and efficient as localised operations. In fact in an earlier blog post, I have hypothesised the possibility of actually Deconstructing the Corporation . While teleconferences, email, remote login, shared screens were all technologies that were used in these situations, the most coveted technology was video-conferencing. This was because the richness and intensity of the interaction was the highest with VC and yet because of bandwidth and other issues it was the most difficult exercise to actually execute upon. More often than not, it was th...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing the Pirates of the Caribbean : On Stranger Tides along with my son and was really impressed with the quality of the 3D technology. Not only was the spectacles that we used lighter but what was more important was that even with the 3D spectacles on, I did not have any difficulty in seeing the non 3D parts of the various movie trailers as well as the other people within the movie hall. Which sets me thinking -- what would happen if our normal spectacles were enhanced with this 3D capability ! Television manufacturers seem to very gung ho on 3D technology and most Japanese manufacturers ( are there any non-japanese manufacturers  ? ) have already placed their products in their market. A recent ad by Samsung claims that even non 3D content can be made into realistic 3D imagery with the press of a button and the use of the correct 3D spectacles. This could lead to an explosion of 3D content and if the success and quality of 3D movies in theatr...

When Kalyani Chaudhuri, the retired IAS officer from West Bengal started to write a book on the death of bureaucracy and governance, she thought that the Left Front Government would rule the state till the end of eternity. Her book -- When the Pendulum Stops -- recounts the depths of depravity to which a state can sink when it is ruled by one political party for a very long time. We are aware of one party dictatorships in the erstwhile USSR and in China but how is it that West Bengal with its periodic elections have had to share this fate ? Let us go back in time and look through a bit of history. The communist parties came into power on the basis of the general mis-governance perpetuated by the ruling Congress party in the 1970s and the first thing that they did to ensure their permanence in power was "Land Reforms". We have been told ad nauseum that because of these reforms the economic structure of rural Bengal was revitalised to such an extent that the generations ...

Today, when Dhoni and his band of merry men are the toast of the town after their brilliant win against the Sri Lanka, it is impossible for me to not recollect an equally brilliant win pulled of by Kapil's Devils at Lords in 1983. I have recorded my feelings of that incredible day on the silver jubilee celebration of that historic win in another post and I do not wish to repeat it once again here. But as I plumbed the nostalgic depths of my memory -- and the bottom drawer of my desk, I came across this wonderful piece of memorabilia that I wish to share with my friends and also saveit  for me and my posterity. Yes, that is Kapil Dev's autograph on a ticket for an India match at Lords but no, it is not THAT historic match. This was later, in 2004 when I had been invited by my client British Petroleum to their box at Lords and yes, India led by Sourav Ganguly did win against England that day. But the best part of the match was my meeting with the hero of my student days -- t...

  THE CALM: Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated. THE DIGNITY: Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture. THE ABILITY: The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall. THE GRACE: People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something. THE ORDER: No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just understanding. THE SACRIFICE: Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid? THE TENDERNESS: Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak. THE TRAINING: The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that. THE MEDIA: They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage. THE CONSCIENCE: When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves & left q...

Science fiction writers and movie makers have long talked about robots evolving to the point of dominating the world and human society. Fortunately this has not yet happened and the possibility of it happening in the near future is quite low. On the other hand, machine generated mass mail -- spam -- has increased to a point where they constitute 98% of the total email ecosystem and can dominate and destroy this very useful service unless one takes special care to keep them at bay. Social bots are an emerging phenomenon that may climb out of the success seen with spams in email and reach out towards what what was considered impossible -- the domination of real human ecosystem. A bot by itself is no big news. Bot -- an abbreviation for a software robot -- is a computer program that imitates human behaviour in certain circumstances. For example you can create a bot, a searchbot, to search the web and report on the best prices for a particular product across various online stores. This...

Baul's are an integral part of the landscape of Birbhum and their haunting music lends enchantment to any evening. On the occasion of Dol Yatra ( or Holi -- for non Bengalis ) we had the pleasure of listening to Gautam Baul as he held forth with his mellifluous tunes under a full moon. What was even more remarkable was that the full moon on this date -- 19th March 2011 -- was also a supermoon, when the Moon is closest to the Earth. 

In the little town of Dubrajpur, near Shantiniketan, Birbhum, West Bengal, there is an area called the "Mama Bhagne Pahar" that is scattered with a large number of huge boulders. Obviously, these are very old rocks, most likely to be remnants of a basaltic pipe that would have pushed through some cracks on the surface of the earth many many years ago. Since then the ravages of time and weather have removed the softer soil leaving the hard rocks standing naked on the ground.  Subsequently aeons of heating and cooling have cracked the rocks leaving them in odd shapes for people like us see and wonder. Here are some pictures of the place Unfortunately, like most places of tourist interest, the entire area is dirty and ill-kept. There is garbage and rubbish everywhere though there has been some sporadic effort to create a park out of this natural bounty but the results are very disappointing.  One of these huge boulders has been sanctified as Lord Shiva -- in the avata...

Like the fifth postulate of Euclid, the twelfth chapter of this book has been a source of discomfort both for me as well as for some of my friends and readers. The need to introduce the Divine to plug a loophole in my logic – an inevitable loophole, given the limitations of the Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness – was rather irritating and yet it seemed that there is nothing I could do about it. Then I met a friend who alerted me to the existence of a very simple concept that was functionally analogous and one that would allow me to bridge the gap. But does it work ? and have I succeeded in doing so ? That question is best answered by the reader I suppose. Technology has moved significantly since the first edition and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of 3D displays. Direct connectivity between the human brain and a digital device has also improved dramatically but we are yet to reach the level of maturity that is necessary to blur the border between the real and illusor...

Thanks to 50+ batches of B.Tech engineers who have passed out through its portals -- and have subsequently percolated into every kind of business on the planet -- IIT Kharagpur is a fairly well known name in the literate parts of the world. Riding on the back of this illustrious tenant, the sleepy railway junction of Kharagpur has emerged from the obscurity of being another town in Midnapore and has also achieved the status of place that people actually go to, not just merely come from ! Those of us who have been to Kharagpur or  arestill there are also aware that the institute premises  include the famous Hijli Jail and is adjacent to the Salua Airforce base which was the home of the Very Heavy Bomber Squadron of the RAF during the Second World War. But what is origin of the name Kharagpur ? A quick search through Google reveals that there are quite a few stories about the place but the consensus is that it is named after the Khargeshwar Shiva temple that is located in the ...

Just 20 kms from IIT Kharagpur, on the banks of the Kangshabati River ( aka Kansai, Cossye ) are the 300 year old ruins of some beautiful terracotta temples that were built by Bidyananda Ghoshal, the revenue collector of Ratnachowk Pargana appointed by Alivardi Khan, one of the notorious Nawabs of Bengal [ The Telegraph ] People have known about the ruins for quite some time and they do get a small but steady stream of visitors but it is the untiring work of Mohammad Yeasin Pathan, a resident of a nearby village , that has really helped preserve what was left of a unique slice of the heritage of South Bengal.         The following pictures are of a second series of ruins that are located a little away from the main road. These temples are better preserved and have intact Shivalinga idols that are still worshipped by the locals. To reach Pathra, one goes North from the National Highway 6 [ Bombay Road ] towards Midnapore. At the Kangsaba...