blog@Yantrajaal

 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 ...

Followers of the Sanatan Dharma, or "Hindus", in general and those who believe in the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as propounded by Sankaracharya, see the world as illusion ("Maya") that hides an underlying unity of universal consciousness or Brahman. This concept has been explored in greater detail in The Road to pSingularity but one of the key ideas is that there exists a central consciousness and all individual sentient entities ( or people) are a part of this central consciousness. The linkage between the central ("Brahman") and the individual ("Atman") is something that gets lost because of the illusion of "Maya" and only the true adept, after significant effort, realises the existence of the link and in doing so, succeeds in uniting his individual Atman with the universal Brahman through the process of Yoga or union. This post is not about trying to establish the authenticity of this point of view. Instead we explore how t...

India celebrates Saraswati on Basant Panchami through the worship and adoration of the Goddess of Learning and the Patron of the Creative arts but few care to remember the river, the so-called mythical river, that serves as a critical bridge of between the India of today and the ancient civilisation that serves as the foundation of the modern nation. This link is very clearly established in Michel Danino's seminal book, The Lost River - On the Trail of the Saraswati , and also explained quite well in his lecture delivered to the students of IIT Madras in 1999. Many more scholarly references to the existence of this river are given in the book but unfortunately the politics of contemporary historical studies continues to deny this important link to India's past. If you think for a minute about a very serious problem in the popular, and politically correct, narrative of Indian history, then the acceptability of the solution offered by the presence of the Saraswati River is ...

A Doll's House is a play by the famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen that talks of women's empowerment.  The Durga Puja, that is celebrated with extreme enthusiasm in Bengal and Calcutta, is also a grand tribute to the Mother Goddess that is rooted in the cult of Shakti worship in India. Traditionally, the Durga idols that are built every year during the festival are immersed in the Ganges, or the nearest waterbody, to symbolise the transience of the material world. However, environmental concerns have prompted many puja organisers to avoid this immersion and cut down on riverine pollution. This year, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation has preserved the ten best idols in a makeshift museum that has been set up in a disused warehouse in the city. You can now see the idols without having to fight through the massive crowds that throng the pandals , or temporary temples that are created to house these idols, during the celebrations. Question is with more than 1000 id...

The singing of the national anthem along with the hoisting of the national flag is principal activity in any Republic Day event. On the occasion of the 64th Republic Day, I have tried to track down some unusual renditions of this very interesting song. The anthem as we know it today, in the words and tunes of Rabindranath Tagore is not the first official version of the anthem even though it was unveiled for the first time at the 1911 convention of the Indian National Congress. Many of us recognise the  Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind or the Provisional Government of Free India, set up by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore on October 21, 1943 as the first post-colonial Indian government with its own currency, courts of law and civil code. Subhas Bose recognized Tagore's song as the anthem but because he wanted to give it a national flavour he had the sanskritized Bengali transcreated by  Col Abid Hassan as "Sabh Sukh Chain" and set to tune by Capt Ram Mohan. This was p...