Forty-two

RCB Demolished

2011-10-13T11:35:00.001+05:30

For a while now, I’ve been pestering my nephews to put their cricketing thoughts on (virtual) paper. I was finally able to corral my younger nephew and get him to write this post.

The Champions League T20 finals RCB VS MI was approached by all with a lot of pomp and hype. Here we were with two sides: the first, a weakened side without its captain and other stars which had made it to the finals fighting all through; the second, sailing through to the finals chasing 200+ scores on consecutive occasions. Who did you expect would win? A MI team without Sachin Tendulkar or a in-form RCB side with Chris Gayle and Virat Kohli going really strong? I thought RCB…but RCB didn’t win, did it? Why ?? Below are the reasons:

1. Overconfidence, having chased down 200 and more on two occasions against better bowling attacks.

2. Maniac team selection by Dr. Vijay Mallya who choose to pay 7.5 crores for a lad who hasn’t even played 50 games for his country but wasn’t willing to pay 5.5 crores for the world’s greatest all-rounder who had performed brilliantly in the previous seasons.

3.Lack of quality cricketers: Being a professional cricketer who plays 5th division for Swastik Union, it disappoints me that I know batsmen who are only 16 and 17 who have greater talent and technique than Saurabh Tiwary and Mohd Kaif. Kaif’s batting grip locks the wrist which disables the best shots such as the drives. Saurabh Tiwary didn’t know he had to get onto the front foot to block a yorker. Further, any cricketer worth his name knows that the safest and the best way to score fast runs is by playing straight, i.e. in the “V”. Chris Gayle and Virat kohli are exponents of playing straight, something that should’ve been a lesson in the nets for Tiwary and Kaif, amongst others. Effectively, RCB went into an international tournament fielding a side without a technically sound middle order!

4. To be able to slog a spinner more often than not you have to get onto the front foot to hit him with ease. One is expected to take his left foot as sensibly close as possible to the pitch of the ball in order to gain balance, power, and control over the shot. Sadly, Mayank Agarwal got out twice trying to slog a spinner with his feet pointing in exactly the opposite direction of the pitch of the ball.

5. Lack of match practice: On most occasions, the middle order and the lower middle order hardly got to bat as Gayle and Kohli were splendid; therefore the already useless middle order of RCB lacked the match practice as well. The complacent RCBians didn’t play practice games so that they could strike some sort of form. Net Practice can never be a substitute for match practice.

6. Bad Captaincy : After Virat, Gayle and Dilshan, the most accomplished batsman in the team is Vettori himself. The moment Gayle and Dilshan were out, Vettori himself should have come out to bat, as on any day he is a proven better batsman than the Tiwarys of the side.

The above reasons contributed to the miserable failure of RCB in the CLT 20 finals. I hope they wont be repeated and will play better cricket in the near future.

Soothsaying and the Congress party

2011-09-04T21:22:00.001+05:30

If recent events have shown something, it is that the Congress party is a soothsayer’s dream subject. If you want to know what the party’s response will be to any situation, you only need to go back in time a few decades and you’ll get the answer.

Let me explain. In 1977, the Congress party was out of power and the Janata party came into power. But they squabbled amongst themselves, and what did Indira Gandhi do? She encouraged Charan Singh to split away, supported him for a while, and then pulled the rug under his feet, which led to elections. Now move the clock to 1989. Rajiv Gandhi lost power, VP Singh and Chandrashekhar squabbled, and Rajiv Gandhi encouraged Chandrashekar to split, supported his government for a few months, and then withdrew support. And the same repeated in 1996.

Similarly, when faced with an upsurge of public antagonism, Indira Gandhi’s first response was to invoke the “Foreign Hand”. Rajiv Gandhi talked about vicious forces that were out to destabilize India when the Bofors scam hit. And today, Rashid Alvi accused a foreign hand (of course, those in the know, know that it is an Italian one) of trying to destabilize India. Indira Gandhi imposed the emergency and foisted all kinds of cases on the opposition; and while the India of 1985-86 wouldn’t let Rajiv Gandhi impose the emergency, he tried his best to muzzle the media by introducing the “defamation bill”. Lo and behold, today we have the “Group of Morons” who are trying to bring in a bill to regulate the media. (Maybe they’ll serve a privilege notice against me as well?)

And while the faces of the henchmen, the a**lickers and the hangers on have changed, their attitudes and languages haven’t changed one bit. See the abuses showered on team Anna if you want proof.

What I’m trying to outline is that despite its dubious claims of having introduced the green revolution, the IT revolution and globalization in India, the Congress party remains a party stuck in the discourse of the 70s. What is further shameful is that the great white hope of the party doesn’t have a single original thought to offer and his family friends (what a TV channel calls ‘Young Turks’) are no better either.

There is no future for the country as long as the Congress is in power. Sadly there is no viable alternative in sight.

(Postscript: To my regular readers: thank you for your enquiries, and I promise I’ll post more regularly in the coming weeks. )

More on freedom

2011-04-24T19:25:00.001+05:30

If my blog were to stand for a single topic, that topic would be "Freedom". I've blogged earlier about the futility of banning skirts, jeans, music, books and so on. Over time, the bans have become more and more ridiculous - women entering a bar, or teachers being forced to wear sarees and so on. But some recent events take the cake.

For instance, Christ College (now Christ University) in Bangalore has banned a chocolate stick. Mahavir Jain college has banned male and female students from using the same set of stairs. Another college has banned standing on campus. What's hilarious is the twisted reasons one hears on why these bans are justified - the staircase ban is ostensibly because the girls' toilet is on the right side of the building and the boys' toilet on the left. Now one wonders - do students climb stairs only to go to the toilets? Or is it the college administration whose heads are in the toilet?

And we have more. The World Badminton Federation has banned women from wearing anything but mini-skirts on the court, ostensibly to popularize the sport. Don't worry about all those women who might be discouraged for the same reason! They can all go and take up knitting.

At least the WBF is honest about why they are doing it, unlike the worthies in Bangalore colleges.

Losers, all.

The joys of testing

2011-04-24T19:02:00.001+05:30

Years ago, in the group discussion round of my first campus interview, my group was given the topic "The role of testing in the career of a software professional". I went first, making a strong case for testing professionals. I spoke about the inevitability of bugs, the economic cost, user impact and how testing was essential to maintain software sanity. I think I made a good case, becuase I was eventually hired for the job, but I knew I didn't believe a single word of what I'd said. In fact, days after the interviews, I was scared by the thought that my passionate case for testing might actually convince the company to put me in a testing role!

Over the years, I've understood the importance of sound testing. I've also realized how much of an intellectual challenge testing really is. Here you are given a piece of software - sometimes you know the code, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes it has a spec, sometimes you create the spec as you go. The software you are testing might be new or it might be tens of years old, will typically have millions of paths through the code and hundreds of thousands of states (with many thousands that could be wrong). How can you figure out how to make the software fail? How can you unearth the hidden assumptions the developer made? How can you write software so that it can be tested easily? How much of your testing effort can you automate? How do you measure the quality of your testing? How do you know you are done?

I was once the member of an interview panel, and we rejected a candidate for the developer's post. One of the managers in the company turned around and asked us "Is s(he) at least good for testing?". I didn't see how ludicrous this statement was then, but I see it now.

We live and learn.

How the UPA is educating the public

2011-01-22T23:54:00.004+05:30

The UPA government has done a lot for education in the country. From the landmark RTE act, which ~~transferred onto~~ included the private sector, responsibility of educating the poor, to the ~~pointless~~ landmark universities bill and continued ~~tampering with~~ guidance for the institutes of excellence, the UPA has been in the education sector. Of course, these pale in significance to the personal initiatives taken by UPA ministers.

First, the home minister gives us an English lesson, telling us that a consensus does not mean agreement of all concerned, but a majority of all concerned. Since the UPA is under the impression that it is ruling by the consensus of a billion people, how can you blame him?

Next, Kapil Sibal, our effervescent minister for all seasons comes in to give the people a math lesson. He has a new branch of math - let' s call it Sonia math for the lack of a better name. Here, the value of an equation depends on the side of the equation that the reader is in! According to Prof. Sibal, the total loss to the country from the 2G scam is zero! Truly, he occupies a universe of thought much different from our own.

Watch this space for more on UPA history, science and biology. But if you want to see something nice, go here: http://www.digitalnarratives.net/ and send me your comments!

More Indian sport

2010-11-28T14:10:00.001+05:30

I love posts where I can say “I told you so”. After the 2008 Olympics, I wondered if this was a new dawn in Indian sport. The events of the 2010 asian games have strengthened my belief that it is indeed so. True, the shooters haven’t lived up to their potential, and the archers didn’t do as well as they did in the commonwealth games, but take one look at the details of the medal tally, and you’ll see what I am talking about.

A 1-2 finish in the women’s 10k race. A 2-3 finish in the 5k race. Gold in the steeplechase event. Gold in the women’s 400m hurdles after 24 years. Gold in the men’s 400m for the first time ever (unless Milkha Singh won it in his time). Gold in rowing. First time medals in skating and gymnastics. Golds in boxing. This games have been quite good for India.

What is also heartening is the manner in which these medals were won. Take for instance, Joseph Abraham’s last minute push to get the gold or Sudha Singh’s desperate lunge to finish first – how many times in the past have we seen Indian athletes overcome their opposition when placed in such situations?

Rest assured, things will improve. These heroes will now encourage more sportsmen and women in the country to come forward. With government support and strong private sector participation, not to mention rising confidence in Indian abilities, the future looks bright. Of course, the 2012 olympics will tell us how far we have come, but I’m more confident than ever that we have crossed one, if not all the hurdles in the way of sporting success.

The ‘developer’ high

2010-10-17T21:14:00.001+05:30

Most of us in the software profession agree that it is probably one of the few honest professions that will pay you a decent monthly allowance for doing something you love to do. But have you wondered why software development is such fun?

Well, as you expected, I have a theory. I think the reason development is such fun is because of the recurring, never-decreasing highs that one gets. Created a cool, extensible design? You have a high. Found a cool way to randomize a list with just one line of LINQ code? You have a high. Debugged a crazy bug that has haunted you for days? You have a high. Positive customer feedback? Another high. Why, even seeing a “all-green” status on your unit test run – even that can give you a high.

And the best thing about the highs is that their intensity is not dulled by repetition – something a good alcoholic smoker friend of mine certified :)

This is probably a key factor that keeps developers glued to their IDEs.

Putting on my trench man hat, I think this is another aspect that differentiates developers from researchers. Researcher highs are fewer and far-inbetween. You publish maybe 3-5 papers every year. Generating new, workable, and innovative ideas that are different from those in the ‘market’ is gut-wrenching work, and new leads probably occur a few times a year. The situation is even worse for managers who have to wait for a product to ship to feel the high.

There is a flip-side to this. It is easy for developers to fall into the addiction trap – sometimes sacrificing long term health of true innovation at the altar of the regular dosage of customer appreciation highs. Managers and researchers can keep their sights on the bigger prize for longer because their work and training (particularly for the researchers) trains them to think longer-term.

Again, let me add my usual disclaimers about this being a generalization and like all generalizations, not applicable to all people and situations! :)

What do you think?

The biggest threat to India

2010-09-19T22:38:00.002+05:30

Ramachandra Guha of “India after Gandhi” fame once visited our lab and gave a talk in our “Kaleidoscope” series. He outlined nine threats to Indian security – Maoists, majority communalism, the divide between the rich and the poor, and so on. Unfortunately, he missed out on three others: the so called liberals and human rights activists, the communists and the UPA.

The common thread to these three threats is that they represent the left in its different colours and flavours. There is the hard-left – the Maoists who are determined to undermine the state militarily, the soft-left, comprising of the activists and the leftists who want to it by sleight of hand, and the UPA who wants to do it by inaction.

Let me elaborate. For long, it has been thought that Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism feeds each other. The most common example is the the Shah bano case and allowing Shilanyas at the disputed site in Ayodhya. One set of fundamentalists got the law amended to undermine women’s rights, and the other got the opportunity to start a ‘communal’ movement. However, what is forgotten in these discourses is the role of the “secularists”, “progressives”, and the “leftists”. While there was widespread condemnation of the Shilanyas and the subsequent yatra, condemnation of the parliamentary amendment was muted. And this is a pattern that is familiar. Secularists who condemn the attack on M.F. Hussain, are suddenly silent when a professor in Kerala has his arms chopped and is suspended from service. ‘Progressives’ who come on to the streets against the burkha ban somewhere in France, don’t venture out when the popular front of Kerala threatens a woman for refusing to wear the veil. Our own Manmoron Singh, who spent sleepless nights at the thought of Dr. Haneef in spending time in jail, had a sound, silent sleep when tens of innocent students (mostly Hindus and Sikhs) were beaten and killed in Australia. In the latest incident, I saw a human-rights activist talk about the suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims without a single nod of acknowledgement towards the suffering of the Pandits, which was one of the worst incidents of ethnic cleansing in the country. The same person went on to call the Panun Kashmir a communal organization – Syed Shah Geelani, a two-state theorist is secular, while an organization founded to safeguard the interests of displaced Pandits is communal!

It is this perverted logic of the leftists, human rights activists, ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ that incites majority communalism. It is this logic that clouds reality, and forces governments into taking illogical decisions. See the debate on the AFSPA for instance. There is not a single shot that has been fired by the Army, yet there is all the hullaballoo about withdrawing special powers to it!

Wonder why the “left” acts this way? The answer is simple – leftism needs victims to survive. Leftism needs to oppose. And leftism hates stability. I can go on about this – but I’ll defer that to a later post.

Java is not a good first language

2010-09-19T22:04:00.003+05:30

I’ve found that the only way to get back to blogging is by writing some random posts. After a hiatus, it somehow becomes very difficult to write cohesive posts on a single topic. The words don’t come out as easily, the sentences don’t seem right, and I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to come up with enough material for my post. Finally, unable to come up with something I like, I abandon the post and add it to an ever-growing list of drafts that I never re-visit.

Anyhoo, for today’s random post, I talk about the threat posed by Java schools to the software profession and the threats that human rights activists, perverse secularists, and the UPA pose to this country.

First, Java schools. While there is long on-going debate in sociology on whether language determines thought (what is called the “linguistic relativity” principle, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), that question in Computer Science is settled. In the world of programming, language does determine thought. Which is why Stroustrup had put in warnings for C programmers to think object-orientedly. Which is why most imperative programmers take refuge in the := and ! operators of SML when they first encounter functional programming. The language you program in makes you think a certain way. The trouble with teaching Java as the first language is that there is no way teachers can teach the way to think in Java (the object-oriented way) without the students undergoing a course in procedural languages. As a result, students end up thinking in way totally unsuited to the language – a class becomes something you create because the language forces you to, and a place where you dump everything that your program needs. Objects become mechanisms to get at the members without the notion of what it means to instantiate something. Access control mechanisms become a unnecessary distraction – if you want a class to access a member in a different class, make the member public. The signature of “main” - “public static void main (string [] args) introduces problems of its own that have been detailed in ACM papers here and here. Beyond these problems, Java abstracts away some of the most critical concepts in Computer science – pointers, memory management, the idea that resources are finite, and the dilemmas programmers face in using and implementing data structures.

The trigger for this rant is a bunch of interviews that my teammates and I are conducting to hire summer interns. Our target pool are the students from the IITs, most with very high GPAs (think 8.8+/10) and two years into their B.Tech courses. All of them have done 3-4 academic projects, and some of them, internships in places like Adobe. Due to their relative immaturity, what we look for are programming basics – choosing data structures, programming recursive algorithms, and some Computer science fundamentals in areas like networking, OSes, or OOAD (depending on the students’ coursework). To our surprise, we found that while most of the students knew the commonly used data structures, very few could choose the appropriate one for the problem at hand. Still fewer got the implementations right, and most wrote code as though they were in programmer utopia – infinite memory, infinite resources, and nothing bad ever happening in the environment. The bigger problem was that not one bloke I interviewed was able to find and debug problems in their code.

There also seems to be this idea gaining ground, particularly amongst the Phd-types that teach courses at the IITs, that programming is secondary to Computer Science, and what matters is “researchy” topics, like IR, machine learning, large scale algorithms or such. At the same time, there is tremendous pressure on the IITs to evolve from being teaching institutions into research institutions. Because they cannot attract talent at the graduate level, it seems professors are taking the route to make the undergraduate program a research program. Good programming techniques and sound concepts of software engineering become “implementation detail”. And writing good code, tests, and having the ability to debug programs is lost on a whole generation of Computer science undergraduates.

Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.

[Postscript: I realized rather late, that this post had become too huge for me to add my second rant. I’ll be posting it separately.]

A trenchman’s view of the ivory tower

2010-04-25T00:41:00.001+05:30

For some time now, I’ve avoided talking about my current job – in fact, I’ve tried to avoid all job-specific posts on this blog. However, ever since I took my current position, too many people have asked me the precise nature of my work - “Research SDE” isn’t a very common job title. Further, for the past few months, as I’ve had my head down in work, my blogging suffered and I realized that writing about work might be the only way to get some content in a Windows Live Writer window.

I underwent eleven rounds of interviews before MSR India offered me my current position. These were conducted on two separate days with a very eventful fortnight in between. Some of interviews went well, and some went poorly, but the one that challenged my entire graduate thesis was the one with a research manager, who is probably the most accomplished researcher in the field of static analysis. And I faced the most enjoyable enquiry I’d faced on my thesis – even better than my thesis defence! Towards the end, he told me (and I paraphrase very liberally): “Sometimes, researchers sit in ivory towers and lose sense of the trenches and make unreasonable demands of developers. Can you describe an instance when you faced a demand you thought was unreasonable, and pushed back?”

At that time, I thought he was talking about hypothetical situations. Why would people who were more technically accomplished than most developers make unreasonable demands of them? It just didn’t make sense. I answered what ever I could forgot about it for quite some time.

Now, four years, half-a-dozen projects and with a bunch of successes and failures behind me, I realize that he was pointing to a fundamental difference in perspective between the two groups in the lab – developers (and I include PMs and dev managers in this group) and researchers. I also realize now that as both an insider in the lab, and an outsider in research, I have a unique perspective (which may be right or wrong). Hence this series. Here, I intend to write about research from a developer’s perspective, and of the life of a developer in a research lab. Please note however, that everything I say here, like elsewhere on my blog, is strictly my opinion, and has nothing to do with my current, past or future employers.

First we introduce our actors. Researchers are starters. They love starting new projects, coming up with new ideas, and working on new problems. Researchers thrive in uncertain situations, love unclearly defined problems, and generally are fond of exploration. Failures are acceptable as long as there is a lesson that is learnt. Theoretical soundness is more important than fit and finish – it is OK to have a solution for a problem that ignores the “corner cases” - provided the problem is unique and challenging enough.

Developers are finishers. We like conclusions, we like definite schedules, and we like knowing that what we are doing will be used directly by our audiences. We prefer certainty and while we do explore, we will almost never put our exploration ahead of our project commitments. Shipping is everything and the user is king (well, most of the time :)). Polish matters – a feature is worth nothing if it doesn’t work on a particular browser or a supported platform. In fact, I remember from my previous companies, exercising our code through automated test-cases on eleven different platforms before getting a green signal to ship.

Of course, these are generalizations. And like all generalizations, they have many exceptions. It does happen that a researcher puts on a developer’s hat for a year or two simply because (s)he is committed to a project/idea. Developers do take technical uncertainty in their stride when required. However, what I’ve outlined is the basic nature of the two species – the starters and the finishers.

In future posts, I’ll narrate some incidents, describe some of the insights I learnt, including working with those beings known as interns, and attempt to paint an honest picture of the life of a trench soldier who was invited to the ivory tower.

Outsiders

2009-12-12T23:08:00.001+05:30

One word that has rung in my ears all this year has been ‘outsider’. Google trends agrees. The last few months have seen an increase in the number of occurrences of this word in news references. And of course, you don’t need a fancy algorithm to tell you that. If you have been even barely alive to the world around you, you’d have heard this yourself.

North Indians are outsiders in Maharashtra. UP folks are outsiders in MP. ‘Indians’ are outsiders in the north-east. Jeans-wearing, pub-hopping women are outsiders in Karnataka. Rich, bratty software engineers who are causing real-estate prices to rise, brides to reject grooms in other professions, and causing moral degradation with their lifestyles are of course, outsiders everywhere. A cricketer, who is the pride of the nation, is an outsider in his home state. Muslims are outsiders for the VHP and its cohorts. Sensible economics is an outsider for the Communists, and the communists are outsiders according to Mamata. Maoists consider industrialists outsiders, as do politicians when the industrialists are supporting a rival party.

We’ve been divided on caste, creed, religion, language, ethnicity, geography – name it. But nothing compares to the weird nature of the Telangana divide.

What the TRS and KCR are asking is a redrawing of boundaries that were first created by a vile Nizam. They want to turn back history and rule like the Nizam did – see KCR’s insistence that all Hyderabad has, was built by the Nizam! He went on to emphasize the division while making the claim for Hyderabad – 5% people of Andhra versus 95% people of Telangana – never mind that they have the same language, same culture, same spicy cuisine, same horrible weather, same TV channels, same film stars, same five letter initials with at least one ‘Venkata’ in their names…and so on. So, ladies and gentlemen, we have a new divide – coastal v/s inland – the ‘ruthless’ Andhraite v/s the ‘meek’ Telangana-walla. Next we can look forward to a pant v/s dhoti divide, or a boxers v/s briefs divide, or maybe even a oily hair v/s dry hair divide. (Note that the sari-jeans divide is already present.)

Who knows, then one might become an outsider for being a left-hander. Right-handers can then protest on being deprived of the ability to write with both hands. They could ask for a state where only right-handers prevailed. Of course, the left-handers could also ask for the same. Maybe then we’ll come to our senses.

Never mind that the real outsiders are having a field day in our open borders, planning and executing attacks with impunity. Never mind the real outsiders who suck the living blood out of the state by their corrupt means. Never mind the fence of law that eats (or rather grabs) the land it is supposed to protect.

Welcome to India!

On the Mumbai attacks

2009-11-22T13:35:00.001+05:30

The news channels are all saturated with remembrance of the Mumbai terror attacks. As I watched the tributes to the martyrs of the day, I couldn’t help but wonder how little things had changed since those three terror-filled days.

The Mumbai attacks were supposed to be our wakeup call. The moment when middle-class India threw off its coat of indifference and embraced the task of nation-building. The time when the nation sunk its differences and came together to fight as one. The clarion call for more professionalism in our police, and indeed, in our government.

Unfortunately, all those hopes have been belied. Six months after the candle-light vigils at the Gateway of India, the middle-class voted overwhelmingly at 40%. If anything, the last two elections have proved that Mumbaikars, (or Bombay-ites, if I may, with deference to the MNS) like their other city counterparts, prefer a vacation over a vote. We are still as divided, on language (witness the Hindi oath taking controversy), on religion (the Vande mataram controversy), and on political lines. We are as intolerant as ever, as unprofessional as ever, and continue to ignore those who try to protect us from such terror. The one terrorist who was caught is still alive, and the ones who messed up during the attacks are back in power, along with the cynicism of appointing the same person who was fired over the Mumbai attacks back as Home minister.

Before I end though, I do want to add a note about the media adulation of the three cops who were martyred that day. If you dispassionately analyze the scene, you’ll realize that these cops charged in without thinking, without examining the situation, and ignoring all their training. You could also ask why Hemant Karkare did nothing about the crappy bullet-proof jacket he was given. Or why three senior officers of the Bombay police were together in one car during such a moment. Or why they underestimated the opponent and were martyred, I presume, without firing a single bullet?

The true police hero of the Mumbai attacks is Tukaram Omble, someone our channels have almost forgotten. Not caring for his life, or the fact that he was unarmed, he fought a deadly terrorist armed with an AK-47, who pumped bullets into him even as he held on, giving the other cops an opportunity to capture him alive. Alive. Think about how strong India’s case against Pakistan has become because Kasab was captured, not killed.

May their martyrdom not go to waste.

HR talk

2009-11-06T15:29:00.001+05:30

Isn’t it funny the way HR folks speak? I mean, they typically say a lot without actually saying (revealing) anything. They never commit, never say no, and always talk as though they have your best interests at heart while ignoring the import of your words.

Do they speak the same way with their families? What if they did? Here is a possible scenario:

Child: [Mommy/Daddy] I want a bicycle

HR Parent: In the current recessionary economy, it will be highly irresponsible to expense recreation items that do not have long lasting value.

Child: Does that mean no?

HR Parent: We will consider the request at the first opportunity of economic revival and revenue growth in the family.

Child: But all my friends have them!

HR Parent: As a family, we aim to be in the top 65-th percentile of “having” things. We believe that our commitment to our children’s growth, our healthy living environment and wonderful family culture contribute to a scenario…

Child (Interrupting): ARRGH! I hate you!

HR Parent: Such strong emotions are uncalled for. We believe that we have taken the right actions given the economic environment. Further…

[Child storms out.]

[Disclaimer: These views are personal, do not reflect the opinions of my employer and are not based on any specific person or institution, living or dead.]

Poor coding and paper.

2009-09-24T12:53:00.007+05:30

Every now and then, when I have time to spare, I take out my laptop and read some of the code I'd written in the past. This includes projects I did during my Bachelors degree, some code snippets of projects I did for my Masters course, and some others, from previous employment. (Of course, I don't have entire projects from previous companies - just a few files that I'd worked on from my home computer. So, don't ask!) Every time I read the code, I cringe. I can't believe I'd written code which was that bad! I see new bugs, violations of coding practices, poor design, and even misuse of language constructs. And I know for a fact that when I was writing all of that code, I not only thought I knew what I was doing, I knew that I knew what I was doing. (Wow - too many I's in this paragraph.) For some time now, this has bothered me, because I have the same feeling of knowing what I'm doing as I write code today. Why would I be correct now? Maybe, in some later year, I or someone else would look at my code and realize how bad it is (was)? Does this happen to others? Have you ever read code you'd written earlier and cringed? If so, use the comments link to send your experience.

I'd earlier mentioned a paper I'd submitted (with some colleagues) that was nominated for the best paper award at FSE 2009. We didn't win, but here is a copy:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/adp/debugadvisorfse09.pdf.

Enjoy.

Free thoughts on Independence day

2009-08-16T21:14:00.001+05:30

I was watching the movie “Gandhi” on Sony Pix and one thing about the Mahatma struck me.

Not only was the Mahatma a great saint and leader, he was a brilliant political strategist.

Consider, his use of non-violence as the principal weapon against the British. By doing so, not only did the Mahatma seize the moral high ground, but he also changed the battle-field, which went from one of ships and guns to that of prayer and lathis. What the Mahatma recognized was that there was no way any Indian army could defeat the British. What could defeat them was an unequal battle that would render their superiority useless. Gandhiji also understood the deep moralistic element of British colonialism – the British never considered themselves as conquerors, they always considered themselves to be on civilizing missions. How could you explain a civilizing mission that beat up and shot people for making salt? Gandhiji exploited this loophole in the British consciousness brilliantly.

The Mahatma also knew the importance of holding the moral high ground, not unlike the high ground that the Indian army fights to hold in Siachen. His suspension of the non-cooperation movement after the Chauri-Chaura incident was one instance, where he took the risk of losing the cause to uphold the principle, and by corollary, the moral high ground.

He was also a brilliant popular leader, one who knew the importance of symbolism in the Indian psyche. Gandhiji knew what moved the people, how he could connect to the people, and had a finger on the collective pulse of the people. Be it the salt satyagraha, or the prayer meetings, or burning western clothes, Gandhiji always selected symbols that he knew would move the people.

Finally, it was the Mahatma who recognized the dilemma of the 1920s Congress. That it was a movement of the elite that the commoners had no use for, and that as long as the 300 million Indians didn’t want independence, the British would have no motivation to leave. It was the Mahatma who transformed the Congress from a debating club to a mass movement, transforming the face of India and the world in the process.

Our education problems.

2009-07-17T16:56:00.003+05:30

So, we finally have a HRD minister who is more interested in education than (de-)saffronisation, a government that understands the seriousness of our education problem, and a bunch of reports that tell the government what to do. Why then, am I putting my skeptic hat on as I write this post?

Because there is nothing to suggest that the government, the minister, or even the reports have moved beyond the command/control mode of operation. Take the Yashpal committee report for instance. It recognizes that the current system of regulators, consisting of the UGC, AICTE, and the MCI amongst others hasn't worked. There is endemic corruption, the latest being this case against the AICTE chiarman and a senior member, inefficiency, and a lackadaisical attitude. But look at what the committee has recommended: a uber-regulator that encompasses all these! How, in the lord's good world is this going to solve the problem? Not only that, the report suggests that this uber-regulator will also solve the problem of multi-disciplinary education! Sixty years after independence, and eighteen years after liberalization, we still haven't understood the fundamental difference between regulation, and control. Our administrators, and report-makers don't get the fact that the best regulation is the market and full disclosure. For instance, instead of having corrupt bureaucrats decide which institute should function and which one shouldn't, have full disclosure of every institute - the intake, the aggregate scores that the students got, the placements that they got, and the types of companies they got placed into, the numbers who went to higher studies, the number of working computers, the facilities in the lab, whether the hostels have enough clean toilets - disclose disclose and disclose. Then let parents and students decide which institutes should survive and which ones shouldn't. Let foreign universities in, set stiff criteria that these institutes should satisfy, but let them teach what they want to. Let every institute pay what it wants to, charge what it wants to, maybe subject to a range that the government can specify. Let there be merit-based salaries for teachers, and scholarships for those students who cannot afford high fees. Let go, but keep a watchful eye.

I can give three instances of why my prescription will work. Today, PESIT is probably the best engineering college in Bangalore. Management and NRI seats in this institute are auctioned off, with waiting lists spanning a few years. Few people know that just ten years ago, few people joined this institute. In fact, at that time, the institute offered to pay the fees of any student below rank 1000 who joined it! The dedication of the founders has led to this institute becoming the top institute in Bangalore. They poached professors from other institutes, got people from abroad to join it, and of course, made a lot of money in the process. But what the city got was a good institute.

My next example is DAIICT, an institute from where my team has recruited many interns. A large number of them have been fantastic and have gone on (or will be going on) to graduate programs in UCB, UWash, and other universities. Our experience has been that students from this institute were really well-rounded, however, I was told recently that the AICTE had refused to recognize the Info. and Comm program that these students had graduated from!

Then, ISB. The International School of Business in Hyderabad has the most expensive MBA programs in India. It wasn't recognized by the AICTE, whose diktats it couldn't live by. However, as this news article points out, it was the only Indian B-school to be in the FT top 20 B-schools in the world.

To conclude, I want to bring in Game theory, of course in a very unscientific way. When you have two competing players each one making a decision knowing fully well the other's strengths and weakness, you usually reach an equillibrium that may not be the best for either player individually, but is a good bet overall. This is what the parent/student v/s institute game would do. On the other hand, cartels break this equillibrium in favour of one party - which is what the nexus between institutes and our current regulators is.

I told you so! :)

2009-06-21T19:58:00.001+05:30

Some time ago, I’d predicted that Google’s next step towards world domination would be to produce a free OS for PCs. And as I predicted, they first made the mobile OS and now, they have the same running on PCs produced by Acer.

PS: This post, like the rest of the blog, only reflects my opinions and has NOTHING to do with my past, present or future employer(s).

Nixon-Kissinger II

2009-06-14T23:12:00.006+05:30

If you are a student of contemporary Indian history, you'd be familiar with the Nixon-Kissinger duo, and their attitudes towards India. While a lot of water has flown down the Mississippi and the Ganges since then, it looks like the wheel of time has come full circle again, giving us Nixon-Kissinger Part 2, also known as Obama-Clinton.

First, some history. Nixon and Kissinger, with no little help from Indira Gandhi, took Indo-US relations to their nadir. In their quest to get China on their side, against the Soviets, the duo looked the other side when Pakistan committed some of the worst abuses of human rights in the sub-continent, in what was then East-Pakistan. They formalized the US policy of preferring dictatorships over democracies, even when those dictatorships brutally supressed the mandate of democratic elections. In fact, Nixon offered to send the "Seventh fleet" carrier group into the Indian Ocean to pressurize India which intervened on the side of democracy. So bad was the deterioration in relations that the leaders of the countries couldn't even talk to each other without one calling the other a b***h.

The intervening years, the Kargil war, India's economic recovery and the Dubya-presidency had all contributed to healing the rift, but it looks like this is one wound the great black healer is going to rip open in his quest to heal other wounds.

Now, it is not wrong that the US has its own national interests in mind. But Obama in his nearly 6-month presidency hasn't made a single serious comment (and I'm ignoring platitudes like the praise he heaped on Moron) towards furthering Indo-US relations. He's made noises about getting India to sign the NPT and CTBT, has completely ignored the nuclear deal, brought back the hyphen between India and Pakistan, put pressure on India to start talking with Pakistan, made Bangalore the enemy in the outsourcing debate and in the latest of his antagonising statements, has opened the Kashmir bogey again. Not since the Nixon-Kissinger era have we seen such 'attacks'.

Will the relationship survive the Obama-Clinton foreign policy administration? I doubt it.

(Postscript: BTW, we had Ramachandra Guha, the author of "India after Gandhi" visit our lab and deliver a talk recently. Next in line are Sudha Murthy and Ramesh Ramanathan!)

Post = Random.NextPost();

2009-06-01T17:12:00.001+05:30

Last week, we had a “Bring Your Child To Work” day, when parents are allowed to bring their kids to work so that the kids can get an idea of what their parents do during the day. We had a wide range of kids – from age 2 to age 14, and boy, was it fun!?

I couldn’t help noticing in all the revelry, that a disproportionate number of the children were girls. Even more peculiar, it seemed that it software fathers had a higher chance of having girl children than software mothers. Non-software folks had either male children or had an equal number.

This couldn’t be statistically true, I thought. But after a quick recap of my friends’ families, I think I’m ready to say that it is indeed statistically possible that male employees of software companies tend to have more girls than their female counterparts, and their male counterparts in other occupations. This needs more evidence, of course, and there needs to be a scientific reason for why it is so, but I think there is enough merit in trying to investigate the case.

And it was last week that I took part in my first protest march. We were protesting against the illegal felling of trees at CNR Rao circle, near IISc, which was ostensibly being done to build an underpass there. Now, I’m not a tree-hugger, and probably will never be, but this was something illegal being done. So, a few friends from MSRI and I went together, shouted slogans against the BBMP, had our photos taken, and came back. I have more to write on why such protests aren’t successful, but I’ll save that for another post.

BTW, here are a couple of photos of me at the protest:

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/5075/iisc-staff-students-protest-tree.html (I'm the one leaning on the tree)
http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=These+cuts+run+deep&artid=9tgoy95Efds=&SectionID=Qz/kHVp9tEs=&MainSectionID=wIcBMLGbUJI=&SectionName=UOaHCPTTmuP3XGzZRCAUTQ==&SEO=

Anyhoo, another thing that happened last week was that a submission a few of us from MSRI made to FSE 2009 was accepted and it’ll be part of the proceedings. The conference itself is in Amsterdam in August. I’ll see if I can post the paper somewhere.

All for a single post.

2009-05-23T19:34:00.001+05:30

So, what do I write about? Well, there is the election and the mess the BJP finds itself in. There is the Lankan Tamil issue. There is a bunch of stuff happening at work. There is the realization that I’ve forgotten to read, and there is a lot of economics that I’ve been ‘reading’. There is also a nice report in "ವಿಜಯ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ" on the measures colleges in Bangalore have taken to ensure a ‘safe’, educating environment for college boys and girls.

Must get out of this mode.

The greatness of Google

2009-03-28T00:37:00.001+05:30

For some time now, friends and blog-readers have accused me of having an anti-Google bias, thanks to many posts on my blog that didn’t share their unbridled enthusiasm about the company. However, for a knowledge-o-phile like me, Google has come as such a blessing that I can’t help but write this post.

As a child, I devoured books. I read everything I could lay my eyes on, and that included “Children’s knowledge bank”, Wisdom, Misha, “Baala vijnana” and many others. Still, so many questions remained unanswered. I had to wait for a book or a magazine article or for someone to answer the questions I had. Many an argument remained unresolved because there was no authoritative source for the subject.

Web 2.0 led by Google and Wikipedia and so many content providers has changed all that. Wondering about tectonic shifts? Go to Google. Thinking why the Afghans have had such a history? Read Wikipedia (but mind you, only as a starting point to other articles.) In an argument with a close friend over some obscure scientific fact? Type your question in Google.

Few companies have brought information to our finger tips like Google has. For that, thank you, Google.

Of course, I have a strong opinion on the Google-Wikipedia duopoly over information, but I’ll let someone else take potshots at it, here.

(PS: Before some of you start wondering, let me disclose: NO, I have not been offered employment at Google, nor am I in a race for working at that firm.)

Technology Notes Vol 1, Issue 8: Lessons at work and play

2009-02-02T22:46:00.001+05:30

This edition of Technology notes is dedicated to some lessons I learnt at work and at play.

* Conceptual Abstractions

If I were to stick my neck out on things I don’t fully understand, I’d do so and say that Abstraction and Recursion are the most fundamental principles in Computer Science. There is something magical about the way these two concepts solve so many problems that we encounter 'in code’. In fact, in the OO design community, “an additional layer of abstraction” is almost a silver bullet for most design problems.

In the last month though, I got first-hand exposure to some conceptual abstractions. In my definition, a conceptual abstraction is one that solves a complete class of problems while trying to solve a single instance of the class. Let me give an example. Over the last year or so, I have been working on a tool that uses some modified IR techniques to solve a problem faced by developers in our organization. We read some algorithms, coded them up, created a service abstraction for folks to use, and made it available to our user community. We decided to publish this work, and I had detailed discussions with my manager and Sriram Rajamani, who is a principal researcher in our organization. In the space of a few hours, we (truth be told, they) created a conceptual framework around our tool, in such a manner that we solved the general IR problem for our problem space! I wish I could write more about it, but I’ll have to defer it till we submit the paper.

* The beauty of Windows

When I got my first PC, nearly 14 years ago, one of the games I loved playing was Xargon, a 1993 game created for DOS. I couldn’t afford to buy the game, so I played a shareware version that was available on a PCQuest CD. 15 years and five OSes later (Win3.1, Win95, Win98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP) I installed the now-free retail version of the game on my XP box, and lo-and-behold, it worked! I had a few problems with the sound card which I was able to fix by some minor changes to the game’s default settings. I don’t think any company makes software that preserves backward compatibility to such an extent. In a world where different versions of Linux are not compatible, where Mac software bought two years ago for the 68x processors won’t work properly on the new Macs, the extent to which Windows preserves backward compatibility is amazing. You can read the 68 posts Raymond Chen has about it here.

* The best feature of Java

The one feature of Java I miss in C#/.NET is that of checked exceptions. You know, you declare a function as

public static void X( ) throws A, B, C

and the function can only throw A, B or C. Clients of this function must handle these exceptions or declare them in their “throws” clause. Further, if a derived class overrides a base class method, it can only throw a subset of the exceptions that the base class method has declared in its “throws” clause. Not only is this a great example of documentation enforced by the compiler, what this also does is takes Java one step closer to the ideal of LSP (Liskov Substitution Principle).

(PS: C++ fanatics will now argue that it too has a “throw” clause. All I’ll say is “don’t use it”.)

Thank you, President Bush

2009-01-25T00:40:00.004+05:30

When President Obama took the oath of office on January 20th, I think I'd have been one of the few people around the world who actually felt sad for President Bush. For all his faults and misunderestimations, President Bush transformed Indo-US ties for the better. Never, after JFK had offered military help during the 1962 war, had any US president taken such an interest in India. Be it the nuclear deal, the de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan, or outsourcing, President Bush's actions were in India's interest (and America's too). His attack on Afghanistan gave us breathing space on Kashmir (remember, in the late 90s, most of the terrorists in Kashmir were Taliban-trained ones). He used America's power to undo the same nuclear apartheid that his predecessors created, one that was created with the sole purpose of containing India. G Parthasarathy, who was in the Indian embassy in the US when the NSG was created, gushingly said after the NSG vote that he hadn't expected to see that day during his lifetime.

So, thank you, President Bush, and good luck with those memoirs.

Are you Indian enough?

2008-12-28T00:26:00.001+05:30

Newspaper reports in the Indian Express and others have mention that the sports ministry has decided to ban players not holding Indian passports from competing for India. Remember, that this is the same ministry which asked Sachin to remove the tricolour from his helmet some years ago. This is the same ministry that could not handle the false doping issue of Laishram Monika correctly. And of course, as I said earlier, if you are incapable of fixing the real issues in a field, you take something insignificant, blow it up into a big issue, and then make crude attempts at hacking a solution for it. Our health minister is the best exponent of this craft in this government, but it appears that the sports minister has decided to give him competition.

What is wrong in PIOs playing for India? They are allowed to buy land in India, they can carry on any occupation in India, and they have every right that a citizen has except the right to vote. Then, why create another class of citizens there? Isn’t it enough that we’ve created separate classes of citizens for flying the flag, separate classes for healthcare, for education, and for every social service? Why do it in sports as well?

This is exactly the sort of megalomania that ministers in India are prone to. Ban live bands, Ban parties, Ban flag-flying, Ban sportsmen.

Technology Notes, Vol 1 Issue 7: Computation and Philosophy (Part 2)

2008-12-25T19:46:00.001+05:30

See my report on the first day here. Unfortunately, it has been a while since I attended the conference, and too many things have happened in the interim, so this part of the report may not be as crisp as I’d like it to be.

I could only attend the afternoon session on the second day of the conference, and only one talk on the third day. I did miss a few (possibly interesting) talks in the process – I have abstracts and contact info of them, so if you are interested, talk to me.

The first talk in the afternoon session on Day 2 was “Mathematics, Computation and Cognition” by Rajesh Kasturirangan of NIAS. His premise was that the study of cognitive basis of mathematics and computation is best done on experienced mathematicians as opposed to children or chimpanzees as is usually the case. He talked about the classic Turing papers on Computational machinery and intelligence and George Lakof’s work which said that computational thought is essentially metaphorical. The question that we must ask, Rajesh said, was of the origins of that metaphorical ability. After this point, I lost him, and the discussions on what should be done got mixed up with what is already done (at least in my mind). He gave some characteristics of mathematical phenomena (like precision), and said that some interesting questions in the area were understanding the cognitive capacity for induction/recursion, and formulating theories for mathematical understanding. In conclusion, he advocated taking a holistic interpretation of the metaphor-mathematical thinking link, to see if they mutually interact and benefit each other. Q&A was OK, and there were some theories that floated around natural language and natural numbers, but I didn’t understand most of the discussion. Important reference here is “Number sense” by Daheane.

Next came what I thought was the least interesting talk of the conference, “Marr’s three-level typology for Cognitive Science”, by S. Pannerselvam of the University of Madras. The speaker simply read out the paper he’d authored without bothering to look once at the audience, or pausing to see if people understood what he was trying to say. Anyhow, Pannerselvam started with the Vision module that Marr describes, where he gives a three-level typology for cognitive science, each level corresponding to one of the three, why, what, and how questions of implementing such a module. He then appeared to contrast it with a connectionist approach pioneered by Jerry Fodor (See "The Elm and the Expert”). In that approach, as opposed to the “implementationist” approach of Marr, there is no central CPU processing information – instead, there is a more of a neural net that has parallel “total cognitive states”. A “Cognitive Transitive Function” would define state changes, although the characteristics of that were not explained by the speaker. The most interesting part of this talk was when Pannerselvam mentioned Jerry Fodor’s Somehow, amongst all these, he mentioned a “Language of thought”, which he said was not a natural language. During Q&A, many in the audience asked him about the characteristics of the language, but he didn’t say much. If you are interested though, go through the link above, and it has quite some information. Dan Dennett and Don Davidson both support the “no thought without language” thesis.

What does a cognitive agent have to do to develop meaning/understanding, or what is called a “grounded representation”? The next talk, by Nagarjuna G of TIFR was on this topic. He introduced Taddeo and Floridi’s (TF) criteria to solve the “Symbol Grounding Problem” (paper by Harnad here) and explained that the drawback of the system was that it did not specify a filtering mechanism to select the states that the cognitive entity would process. Other models were discussed, for instance, the Symbolic model (where the brain was a CPU that had sensory I/O), and the Connectivist model (that of neural nets and parallel states). The other shortfall, btw, of the TF criteria was that the entity under observation was assumed to have an abstracting ability that evolved from evolution! From what I understood, these models assumed something like the following: the eye only let light through, and the brain and its structures decided what we were seeing and equally importantly, what was the importance of what we were seeing. The alternative model that the speaker proposed used “Active perception” and a sensory system where inputs collided with each other (think seeing and hearing at the same time), and not everything that was perceived was processed. There was more information on this, but I’ll let you read his paper: “Muscularity of the Mind”. The talk seems to make more sense, the more I chew on it, so I’ll try and post an addendum here later.

The final talk of the day was on the "Status and Justification of the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT)”, by Jonathan Yaari of the Hebrew University. The premise of this talk was that CTT was a contingent (i.e. aposteriori and necessary) thesis and one that didn’t require proof (or was unproveable) – similar to the fundamental axioms in geometry. The speaker wanted to use Kripke and Putnam’s theory of the existence of scientific ‘sentences’ that are both aposteriori and necessary to show that CTT was both a posteriori and necessary. See this article for more on the theory itself. What he failed to give though was a proper ‘reduction’ from CTT to the K-P theory. He also described CTT, attempted proofs for CTT, and K-P theory for too long to have time for a proper explanation of his ideas. Q & A focussed on this and other questions on computability, and while there were some good points raised, I don’t remember any of them now :(.

The last talk I attended was “Modularity revisited” by Pritha Chandra of IIT-D. The question Pritha raised was whether FL(N), the Faculty of Language (Narrow) was modular as Fodor defined it. I didn’t really get the point of the talk, except for her conclusion that FL(N) was modular. I’ll put some references here if you are interested: Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, Spelke’s work on why FL(N) isn’t modular, paper talking more about FL(N) by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, and papers defending modularity of FL(N), by Fodor and Butterfill.

I’ll post my conclusions on the conference in a separate post. :)

Of love, leagues and relationships 7: Page rank

2008-12-16T15:08:00.002+05:30

Previously in love, leagues and relationships…
…New samvat's, the festival that celebrated 60,000 years of human existence. Would he be able to enjoy the day?

Arthur felt a light feeling in his head. His feet weren’t on solid ground. Trying to piece together what had happened, Arthur recollected drinking heavily on Samvat, getting into a car and driving off into a dark highway. He could recollect seeing two big lights, growing ever larger, swaying from side to side, approach him. What happened next was no mystery. As Arthur struggled to get a firm footing on the ground, he realized that he was no more.

Arthur kept feeling lighter, he felt himself being sucked up as though a power vacuum was running up in the clouds. In seconds, he flew through the clouds, through the solar system, outside the Milky way, and landed in a long queue that led to a train station.

A large board in the distance read “Pearly Gates”. A smaller board indicated that the Pearly Orient was due to start in half an hour.

The queue progressed forward at a rapid pace. Soon, Arthur was only a few feet away from what he thought was a ticket counter. To his surprise, he saw most people disappear once they reached the counter, and only a few were let through. Intrigued, as Arthur waited for his turn, he overheard this conversation:

“But I have been a man of god all my adult life! And how can you let this terror on the street through while preventing me from entering?”

The TC replied: “God is not only concerned about your means, but also your ends. This auto driver from Bangalore made more people pray to God while he was driving, while all you did was put people to sleep with your sermons! Three years in Hell for you!”

With a poof of smoke, the preacher disappeared.

Arthur was next, and the man at the ticket counter pulled up what looked suspiciously like Arthur’s favourite search engine and typed his name in. In seconds, Arthur’s life flashed on the screen. Images from his life, videos of acts he’d done, reams of text of things he said or thought, profiles of his friends, in short, his entire life appeared on the screen. Finally, at the bottom, there was a single score in large bold letters: a small negative number with the title “LifeRank score”.

The ticket collector’s face darkened.

“You will have to go to Hell.” he said.

Arthur was terrified. “But I’ve done nothing wrong!”, he exclaimed. “I was god-fearing, did the right things always, was pro-environment, kind to animals and was helpful to people! Why should I go to Hell!?”, he asked. Unable to contain his curiosity, “What is that LifeRank score?”, he added.

“Ah, a software engineer, aren’t you?”, replied the TC. “Always curious, but never doing anything useful.” Arthur was peeved by the judgment. Still, one doesn’t argue with a man who decides your time in eternity, so he let the TC continue. “LifeRank is a score computed by weighing in your accomplishments in life, your carbon credits, animal credits and other factors. However, the most important factor in the LifeRank score is the rating given to you by the people you know, and their LifeRank scores. You see, in eternal life, as in real life, where you end up depends mostly on who you know.”

Arthur was amazed. “Why is my score negative? Is that bad? What _are_ the components of my score?”, he enquired.

“Sorry, that is a secret”, replied TC. “The precise weights given to each component is only known to the One. What I can tell you is that you seem to know many people with a negative life rank score who think you are a great person. And that is BAD.”

“What!?”, exclaimed Arthur. He could not believe what he was hearing. “Why should I get a bad score because some bad folks think I’m good?”, he asked in an agitated voice.

“Simple, my man.”, replied TC, with the patience that only eternal life can bring. “Who do you think would Adolf, the patron saint of Hell, rate highly, Mussolini or Gandhi? Who would Gandhi rate highly? Stalin, or Lincoln? If you are rated highly by someone with a negative score, your score becomes negative. ”

Arthur couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His mother always told him to be careful of the company he kept, but little had he realized that her advice could come to haunt him this way!

“But I must know a few good people”, he said, defensively. “Yes, you do”, replied TC. “However, none of them rate you as highly as the negative ones do. Sorry, I must let you go.”

Dejected, Arthur took one last look at the screen, and saw the hint of a familiar multi-coloured logo. Suddenly, with a smile, he said, “Are _you_ using the PageRank algorithm developed by Search., Inc? Wait, this even looks exactly like their home page!”. TC was taken aback. Clearly, he hadn’t met many software engineers, particularly not those with Arthur’s keen eye. Recovering, he said “PageRank? That is just a prototype of the real algorithm. What we use is LifeRank – which the One created. He did give away an early prototype to Lerry Brim and Sogay Page. However, PageRank is ages behind LifeRank – it doesn’t scale, it requires expensive computers, and a whole lot of energy. LifeRank, on the other hand is IJW. It Just Works.”

“So, _you_ guys started the greatest battle of 21st century computing!”, exclaimed Arthur. “But why did you give Page rank to Search., Inc, and not to their rivals, Myahoo?”. Arthur knew he was on to something exciting. “Oh, that is because of their motto – don’t be evil.”, replied TC. “And yes, we know, they haven’t really stuck to their ideals, but hey, they’ve served as a brilliant marketing tool for God. Remember, everyone does marketing all their lives. Even God.”

Arthur could not believe what he was hearing. He managed to ask: “What about their rivals?”.

TC replied, with a huge smile: “Oh, they went to heaven. After all, haven’t you heard of the Vista operating system? By making people wait for long minutes during reboots, the company gave people, particularly, a community as under-devoted as software developers, time to think about the true meaning of life. Would such a deed go unrewarded?”

Arthur had no more questions. He closed his eyes, expecting the worst.

(PS: A number of statements and anecdotes here are not my own. Full credit to the authors - Vibhuti for the "marketing statement", and Anon for the autorickshaw joke.)

Technology Notes Vol 1, Issue 6: Computation and Philosophy (Day 1).

2008-12-15T14:51:00.001+05:30

This issue of Technology notes is dedicated to the "Computation and Philosophy" conference held at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. There were more than 25 talks (of which I attended 13), and although I went in with some degree of trepidation, I must say I wasn't completely lost. I am still chewing on what I heard and on my notes, so what you see here is a half-cooked report on the three day conference.

A few caveats first: As I don't have formal training in philosophy, everything I say here is what I understood from my low perch in Computer science, so please take everything in this post with a healthy dose of skepticism. Further, conclusions I draw here are my own, and they may not be what the speakers intended.

The one big lesson I drew from the conference is that a reductionist approach is grossly insufficient to describe many complex systems, one of which is our own ability at computation, which includes the ability to learn language.

The first hint towards this came from the talk on Templates, Complexity and Autonomous systems by Paul Humphreys. Prof. Humphreys is an authority on emergent behaviour, and he contrasted reductionism to a constructionist approach to explain higher-order properties. While reductionists argue that all higher orders of properties can be explained by interactions amongst lower-order properties, constructionists believe that there are levels in the reductionist hierarchy which are not algorithmically accessible from the previous levels. That is, there are higher-level properties that cannot be reduced to the interactions between the properties that exist at lower-levels (think genes->proteins->organs). The question Prof. Humphreys asked was whether this irreducibility was provable. He explained his results using Ising models and Cellular Automata, but I was unable to understand the gist of his discussion, as it assumed that one knew these concepts apriori. Overall though, I think his point was that it can be proven that it is not possible to have models of sufficiently complex physical systems where every property can be computed. I'm still reading up on some of the papers he mentioned, so if you are interested, Sorin Istrail's paper at STOC 2000 is one suggested for reading. I'm still trying to figure out what he said, and once I do, I'll put it up here for more discussion.

The next two talks, "Algorithms in Indian tradition" and "Mathematical, Algorithmic, and Computational thinking in the Indian mind-scape" were rather boring. Both speakers talked about the glorious Indian tradition of science, and while the first speaker, M D Srinivas, gave an illustration of how Aryabhata and other Indian mathematicians wrote maths in poetry, and were able to compute functions like sine-inverse, Veni Madhavan who gave the second talk said that the notion of proof and generality didn't arise in the Indian mathematical tradition because of the poetic way in which mathematics was passed down. The first talk was a repeat of a talk I'd attended at MSRI, and the second had zero proof and lot of hand-waving as to why poetry caused Indian mathematicians to miss a glorious opportunity to own, for example, the "Chinese remainder theorem". The speakers tried hard to avoid being patriotic, but that feeling somehow snuck in, and in addition, beyond making an unproven statement that poetry is some sort of an enemy of generalization, was completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

Some of the Q&A here was good though, with some people debating whether notations freed or constrained thoughts of people - Greeks, for instance, not going beyond the third power simply because their mathematics reduced to geometry, and they were unable to visualize a fourth dimension. No conclusions were drawn though.

These talks were also the started the trend of poor presentations in the conference by many of the speakers. So many of them came unprepared, many didn't have slides and read from papers or books they'd written, and one person literally recited his paper during his presentation.

Anyhow, the next talk was by N. Raja from TIFR, on the "Philosophy of Software Artifacts". This talk was another disappointment, particularly because I was really looking forward to what he had to say. N. Raja spent a LOT of time talking about denotational v/s operational semantics, explaining the lambda-calculus, and quoting books (for instance, "Meaning and Interpretation" by Charles Travis). I didn't get the point of his talk, however – I guess he was trying to introduce the different approaches to semantics in Computer Science. Some of his references though are interesting reads, notably the Scott-Strachey paper "Towards a mathematical semantics for computer languages" and Peter Landin's work on a lambda-calculus-based abstract machine. Overall, the talk wasn't crisp and while the speaker had slides, there was a lot of back-and-forth movement, and not enough time devoted to making a single, "take-homeable" point. The one thing I remember about the talk was a flat joke about how computer scientists are formalists on the weekday and 'something else' on the weekends, but I forget what.

The next talk was post-lunch, and it was by Amba Kulkarni on "Panini's Ashtadhyayi", on Sanskrit grammar, which incidentally is the first generative grammar known to us (think Chomsky's hierarchy for what a generative grammar is). Kulkarni made the point that Panini was aware of information coding abilities of language, and the need for brevity while defining grammar, and she explained how Panini used anuvrutti or factorization to get brevity in his definitions. (See the section on "IT markers" on the wiki page.) There was a lot of room for ambiguity, and in such cases, he took refuge in meta rules and akansha (what the listener expected) to resolve it. Essentially, there were phonemes, called shivasutras and rules called anubandhas that mimicked Niklaus Wirth's famous book: Programs = Data + Algorithms, with shivasutras playing the role of data, and anubandhas, the algorithms that defined the composition and behaviour of these data items. Kulkarni also gave some 'proof' (quotes intentional) for how the system is similar to OO programming, and quoted a paper by a Yale professor on inheritance in ashtadhyayi which had dealt with this issue. I only realized later that she meant a completely different inheritance - the paper here says

"What distinguishes Panini's approach is not only temporal priority, but a novel method of interleaving formal and semantic specifications along a single inheritance path to model many-to-many correspondences between the formal and semantic properties of derivational affixes"

leaving me clueless. Maybe a linguistics person can clarify this? Meanwhile, it was time for Q&A, and when there is talk of Sanskrit, how can talk of programming be far behind? Quickly, a consensus formed, excluding the two Microsofties present, on the suitability of Sanskrit for computer programming. Never mind that the grammar itself is ambiguous, and requires human understanding (see the point about akanksha) for interpretation. Of course, I'm NOT a qualified linguist, and it may indeed be possible to program in Sanskrit. One does wonder though why a compiler hasn't been built to translate Sanskrit into say, English.

Next was a talk on "Computation and the Nature of writing" by Sundar Sarukkai. This was an interesting talk, where he first defined computation as the manipulation of symbols leading to a conclusion. Then he asked the difference between writing and computing. Quoting from a reference I didn't record, he mentioned that the essential characteristics of writing were temporality, progressivity, and that it was a representation of speech, which itself was a representation of thought and was a second order copy of information. He then introduced cognitive models of writing favouring the "planning, organizing, goal-setting" model, and was emphatic that all three occur in parallel. Writing was also goal directed, he said, with process and content goals being satisfied through a process of translating thought to symbols. Coming back to computation, he mentioned semantics was the bugbear for math, and that removing meaning from symbols gave it a certain purity, and allowed 'logic' to operate on them. Thus 'symbol-centrism' became central to computation. Ultimately, his conclusion was that the two were similar, as both did translations of thoughts into symbols on a medium. He did leave a few questions open, for instance, the rules for a "metaphysics of computation", or the difference that writing and speaking make to the computability of mathematics. Considering how the talk concluded, I must say that while the talk itself was well presented, the conclusion was something anyone with very little knowledge of philosophy would have come to. But I guess that is the challenge of philosophy - to provide theories for understanding even those things that we think are obvious.

The next session of three talks was dedicated to Biology. It started with a talk by Vijay Chandru of Strand genomics on a "Systems View of Biology". Vijay started by saying how a reductionist approach to biology has failed to describe higher order behaviours like organ function, (See "Music of Life" by Dennis Noble for more on this), and gave an illustration of the work Strand is doing in their field by the example of hepatotoxicity detection. Strand seems to be doing very well, and they appear have teams of PhDs and MDs tackling every problem in a co-ordinated way. The talk though didn't have too many insights beyond telling us that computation will change the way biology is done in this decade or the next.

Next in the biology series was Dr. Raghavendra Gadagkar's talk, "Decision making in Animals", by far the best talk of the conference: well presented, with a lot of content, and independent research backed up by evidence. The subject was apparent intelligence of decision making in bees and other social insects - for instance, bees are known to convey both the distance and direction of food accurately, and other bees are known to follow up taking into account the rotation of the earth. Ants find what is usually the shortest path to food. His conclusion was that all this is done by following certain simple heuristics - for instance, ants set off in all directions in search of food, leaving pheromones on their path. When a food source is found, the ant finding it traces its way back to the nest. If two ants find two different routes to the same food, the ant which returned first would leave a stronger pheromone trail (as it has passed the route twice). An ant that sets off after the first one returns will simply follow the path of the stronger pheromone, increasing its strength. Ants that come later continue to follow the same rule, making the path the standard one. The experiments suggested were simple, and brilliant (at least to a layman), and this was clearly the best talk of the conference. [May I make a recommendation that he be invited to give a talk at MSRI?]

The final talk of the day was by M G Narasimhan of NIAS on "The Genetic Code as an Information Entity". The speaker spent a lot of time talking about DNA and Watson and Crick and the whole history of the study of DNA, and by the time he came to his conclusions, his time was up, and so was our patience. We left without waiting for the Q&A.

Will write about Days 2 and 3 in the next post.

The Google OS.

2008-12-07T22:33:00.006+05:30

It is so gratifying when a prediction you make comes true (or nearly true). Internetnews says that Google is hiding OS signatures for packets coming out of Google.com. Wonder why. Remember though, that you heard it first here, a few months ago, when I'd speculated that the ultimate Google weapon against Microsoft would be a Google OS - this report says that they may actually be working on one, even as we speak!

Sweet!

On Open Source

2008-12-02T14:38:00.002+05:30

I am a big fan of Open Source. I think it is the greatest ode to teamwork: Just imagine, getting people from nearly all over the world, with completely different interests, who've never seen each other, to work on a common project! Simply amazing. The sophistication of processes that open source teams (well, at least in Linux development) have achieved deserves kudos. Not to mention the opportunity it gives for students and amateurs to learn both by doing and by actually seeing what goes on under the hood of any software application. Being open to scrutiny, bugs get fixed relatively quickly, and security flaws are fewer - well, that is at least what I've heard.

However, what bugs me is the simplistic formula - "Open source = good; Proprietary software = bad." That is, anybody, any entity that supports open source is cleansed and becomes pure good, while any entity that doesn't becomes an incarnation of the anti-Christ.

Take, for instance, this comment on a page debating the virtues and vices of Google:

"Google is not evil. They encourage open source software. They have effectively counteracted Microsoft and Apple closed source systems to the benefit of the public. ..."

(Ed: I've removed the part of the comment talking about text ads - those are great innovations and have nothing to do with evil or good.)

Of course, the author of this comment wasn't probably aware that Google's search algorithm is still secret. (Don't pop the PageRank paper at me now - Google hasn't open-sourced it's actual search algorithm that runs on production machines - a lesson they learnt after publishing the page-rank algorithm as grad students.) Or that Google has been sued many times for violating someone's patent (this maybe simply for money), or someone else's copyright. Or the fact that Google submitted to the Chinese censors without as much as a whimper.

If you are not giving out secrets that matter most to your company, then you are no different from all the companies that work with closed source. Why isn't this obvious to people? Why are we always on the lookout for a white knight that battles the dark satanic forces of commercialism?

Open source software is no longer groups of individuals creating world-class software for nothing but fame or their love of software development. Open source is now backed by companies with millions of dollars - think Google with Mozilla/Linux, IBM and HP with Linux, and the countless others that pay developers good money to write Open source software. None of them are doing it out of the good in their hearts. They are doing it because it gives them a competitive advantage, good publicity, or the chance to shoot at a rival over the shoulders of 'Open source' developers.

(Been unable to write anything on the Mumbai attacks yet. Still trying to formulate a sensible post.)

(Not a) Quantum of Entertainment

2008-11-17T18:09:00.001+05:30

I am not a fan of Bond movies, so when my team decided that "Quantum of Solace" was where we'd spend our morale money, I suppressed a silent groan.

Nearly all Bond movies I've seen follow a theme. The movies start with a chase of sorts, after which Bond goes to M for a debriefing, then meets Q and examines some cool gadgets, then goes out to a gathering, meets the Bond girl, introduces himself with the time-worn "Bond, James Bond" line, sleeps with her, pisses off the villain, and then, well, you know. And Bond is cool, and never gets ruffled by all the action around him, while the villains only keep a facade of cool, before losing their cool and their game to Bond.

However, I'd seen 'Casino Royale' and was impressed with Daniel Craig's portrayal of the Bond character, and was therefore semi-keen to see this movie.

Unfortunately, the movie has no storyline, has no original action sequences, has poor continuity (although we may have our censors to thank for that), and pointless characters.

However, the elephant-in-the-room problem is that the villains in the movie suck. They are terrible. The director seems to have forgotten that the most important part of any superhero movie is the villain. It's the villain who is proactive, who throws the gauntlet, and the superhero simply responds. So, for the superhero to be 'super', the villain must be super too. A Superman must have a Lex Luthor with alien technology, a Batman must have a Joker, and a Hulk must have a gamma-ray enhanced Maj. Blonsky.

The villains in the "Quantum of Solace" are anything but super. Dominic Greene looks like the fake secret agent who pees in his pants in the movie "True Lies" and the other villain, the general, cannot stay within his pants and wants to do everything in sight. There is absolutely no class in the movie.

But this is not the movie's only problem. Throughout its one-and-half-hour span, one is left wondering what it is trying to say. I concede that some of it might be due to our over-eager censors exercising their fingers, but I came out of the theatre with a headful of plane crashes, car crashes, and killings, without being able to piece them together into a story. Further, I think the director does not know the difference between a fast-paced movie and a movie which has fast-paced camera work. This is particularly evident in the first fight scene, in which both Bond and the corrupt agent wear the suits of the same colour, and keep moving through buildings, making it near-impossible distinguish the puncher from the punchee through most of the scene.

Continuity is another issue - in the last scene, Dominic Green tells Bond that he has answered everything Bond asked and should be left alone. But that scene is never shown in the movie!

Finally, the movie brings in characters that have no meaning whatsoever to the story. For instance, there is the cute-as-a-button girl from the English consulate, who has no role but to be the Bond bimbo, and of course, a convenient target for the villains.

Zero stars for the movie. I'm just glad I didn't pay to watch this crap.

132, 6809, 619, 10/74, 110*, and a gentleman to boot.

2008-11-02T22:53:00.002+05:30

"Only one team played in the spirit of the game"
If you wanted to know what Anil Kumble's words were worth to the world's cricketing fraternity, the response he got to this line at Perth should be enough.
Goodbye and best wishes to a brilliant bowler, a wonderful team man, and above all, a gentleman cricketer. Thank you Anil Kumble, for your wonderful heroics on the cricketing field.

Where is our Obama?

2008-10-26T21:36:00.007+05:30

Through Krishna, the protagonist, Maharshi Veda Vyasa has this brilliant saying in the BhagavadGita :

"यदा यदा ही धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भावती भारता। अभ्युथ्थानाम अधर्मस्य तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम। परित्रनाय साधुनाम विनाशायाचा दुष्कृताम धर्मं सम्स्थापानार्थाया संभवामि युगे युगे।"

"Whenever righteousness is on the decline, O Bharata, and Adharma is on the rise, then I will incarnate, to protect the innocent, punish the evil doers and establish dharma, I will incarnate in every yuga"

If you look at the BhagavadGita as the allegory it was meant to be, what the poet is saying is that societies produce great men and women at times of distress, great men and women who fight lawlessness, injustice, and ignorance, and attempt to establish an order of righteousness. Think about it - the darkest period in Indian history, that of occupation by the British produced some of our greatest heroes. Interestingly too, each one perished as soon as his ordained job on the planet was done. The Mahatma was killed after India got independence. Sardar Patel died soon after integrating the princely states. And you could say that Nehru passed away only after laying a firm foundation of democracy and secularism in India (although I myself may not agree with that). My favourite columnist, Rajeev Srinivasan once wrote about precisely the same issue, although with a slightly religious bent here.

No, I have not become a religious person overnight. I still don't think that a God re-incarnated, or that the Mahatma and Sardar Patel were destined to do what they did (I used those words in rhetorical flourish). I do believe though that societies that survive for long, produce from within themselves, heroes on a regular basis - heroes who challenge the status quo, who inspire millions to fight against the injustice of the day, and who change the history of the society irrevocably.

Every lasting society has seen such people. Heroes like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson guided the country through its creation. Lincoln, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson came in to bring equality. And today, Barack Obama has become the harbinger of promised change after eight years of 'Bush-raj'.
At a time when the very existence of India is under theat, when those principles that put Indian citizenship above considerations of language, religion, caste and region are under severe stress, where, I ask, is our Obama? Where is the Sardar who can fight the 'Raj' of the Thackeray clan? Where is the Nehru, or the Shastri who'll inspire the people to put the nation before themselves? Or the JP who will put the law above petty considerations of religious vote banks?

Little men, huge and fragile egos, a sound-bite ridden media and an uninterested educated class. The perfect recipe to kill the Indian experiment with democracy.

The Indian man and the wall.

2008-10-09T22:43:00.003+05:30

Have you noticed how most Indian men are attracted to walls? To them (I deliberately won't use the word 'us', because a decent minority is an exception to what I'm going to say), a clean wall is what a canvas is to an artist, what a sheet of empty paper is to a poet, and what a pole is to a dog. In fact, these worthies like walls so much that they even named a person after that.

Ofcourse, not all of them have the same sentiment towards the wall. A clean wall brings out the artist in some, who by wavy motions of their hips etch out their self-image on the wall. For some others, it brings out the literateur, and encourages them to sign off on the wall, and for most, a clean wall brings out the animal, forcing them to mark out their territory with the zeal and enthusiasm of their four-legged ancestors.

And there are the mechanisms of 'delivery'. Some prefer to stand at their full height, as though they are covering themselves in glory. Some others squat, hiding their faces in shame, as they imprint their pathetic selves on the wall. Still some others focus intently on the 'job' at hand, ignoring everything happening around them.

You know what I'm talking about - rivulets of shame that adorn all public walls in the country. If someone unaware in the way of the Indian man were to look at our walls, he/she would have to be forgiven for thinking that it was some form of post-modern depiction of mountainous scenery.

Try stopping these worthies from carrying out their business, and you'll face a flood of abuse that is only rivalled by the trickle they are letting go on the wall. You are first asked if you own the wall, or if your father inherited it, and if you reply in the positive, you are accused, among other things, of being a wall-owning elitist, who can't even stand to share it with those whose need for it obviously exceeds yours.

Ingenious methods have been devised by wall owners to prevent their walls from falling victim to a passing 'painter's fancy. Messages like "ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಹೇಸಿಗೆ ಮಾಡಬಾರದು" are regularly ignored both by the literate and the illiterate. I remember many years ago, the BMP introducing sign boards like this one in the city, and one man went about doing his job squatting under the sign. Apparently, he thought that it was only wrong to stand while 'doing his job', but squatting was perfectly acceptable.

The only sign that has worked though, is to embed into the walls, pictures of gods. Now, with India being what it is, a secular democracy, people have even gone to the extent of including gods of all faiths - I once came upon a wall that had Ganesha, Jesus, Guru Gobind Singh, and the cresent moon and star sign on the same side. Apparently, this had worked, as the wall was spotlessly clean!

Just ranting on a holiday. Happy Dasara folks!

Free speech and conversions

2008-09-20T22:51:00.006+05:30

In recent days, there have been a spate of attacks on Christian churches in Karnataka, apparently fuelled by illegal conversions and by some literature that was circulated regarding the Hindu faith. Now, I've read many Christian cartoons that lampoon other faiths. They all read the same - two friends are talking, one of them is a Hindu/Muslim/'Pagan', and the other, a Christian. The non-Christian talks about how his god is great, and the Christian demonstrates by either kicking the idol, or invoking the Bible, that the Christian god is the greatest. Some other times, the non-believer in question faces trouble and invokes his god, which doesn't work. He then 'takes refuge in Jesus Christ'. Lo and behold, all his problems are solved, and he converts to Christianity.

Hilarious, don't you agree? The same stories have been used to convert masses of lower-caste and poor Hindus into Christianity. Apparently, these people were also given bribes - money, education, or health-care at missionary institutions to convert. And that, according to the BJP government, is anti-national, never mind what the constitution says about free speech and freedom of religion.

Countries have a right to free speech enshrined in their constitutions because a citizen's words must be protected from those who are 'offended' by them. Similarly, a right to freedom of religion includes freedom to propagate it, as long as it is not accomplished by coercion or force. Incidentally, religious conversions through bribes is NOT illegal nor is it a 'cognizable' offence.

Of course, I don't expect the VHP/Bajrang Dal goons to understand the constitution. But what I don't get is why the VHP, BD and whoever else produce evidence on those who convert forcibly? Why don't they setup hospitals, schools, and go and work with the poorest and most deprived, and convert them back to Hinduism? Why don't they educate the illiterate, so that they can distinguish between genuine intentions and propaganda? Instead of beating up people and generally giving Hinduism a bad name, why don't they read the Bhagavad Gita, and recognize that even Christianity is another way to the same god?

Well because, that is hard work. Because it takes an understanding of Hinduism that these goons are incapable of fostering within themselves. And because it isn't as easy as vandalizing a place of worship with implicit state backing.

Shame on you, Yeddyurappa, for supporting these acts.

The Dark Knight.

2008-09-18T21:12:00.001+05:30

I've postponed this review for a long time. Because I never thought I'd get this right. I still don't think I can express in words, my euphoric reaction to The Dark Knight, but I have to try.

Nearly everyone who has seen The Dark Knight agrees that it is a fascinating movie and that Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker is 'iconic'. So, I won't waste bandwidth by repeating that. I will though, try to explain why I liked the movie so much, and hopefully, that'll highlight a different perspective from the ones so far.

As a child, I was a prolific reader of comic books - Phantom, Flash and Batman were among my favourites. Of course, I read all the Indrajal comics, Super-,Spider-, Iron- and many other men, enjoyed Suppandi's jokes in Tinkle, Premchand's epics in the Chandamama, and a dozen others. Batman, though, was very different from the rest of them.

Nearly every character in Batman has a tragedy behind him/her. Batman and Robin's parents were murdered, the Penguin abandoned as a child, the Riddler was ridiculed, Mr.Freeze lost his wife, and Two-face was a staunch attorney till he was burnt and his girl-friend left him. (In the original; the movie says otherwise.)

That made the stories very interesting. Every character battled with their own history as well as with their opponents. A cloud of sorrow hung over the battles that were fought. The city of Gotham was dark, not because of a lack of light, but because of divisions, crime, and corrupt leaders, not unlike any modern Indian city.

Amidst all these, was the Joker, the prima donna of villains, the complete psychotic, who was was in a different league of villain.

Until Christopher Nolan came on the scene, no Batman movie came close to capturing the essence of these characters. The sets were too dark. Futile attempts were made to give Batman an aura of "batness" that never worked. The actors didn't know what they were doing (Tommy-lee Jones playing Two-face as a raving lunatic) or were too cute (nearly every Batman and Nicole Kidman) to portray the nuances of the Batman characters. In particular, Tommy-lee's portrayal of Two-face was more pathetic than Indian hockey - completely out of character, hopelessly out-of-depth, and looking for excuses to cover up bad performance. Catwoman and Mr.Penguin were better, but the directors did not succeed in freeing them from naive story-telling.

Nolan, with Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart and Christian Bale has done it right. Finally, we have a trio who understand what made the Batman comics a hit. We have a trio who are as comfortable with Frank Miller's dark knight as they are with Bob Kane's Batman. Add to it brilliant special effects, perfect support roles, and scintillating screen-play, and even while we have to forgive some mistakes like the story of how Harvey becomes Two-face, we get magic. Pure magic.

It's been a long while since a movie captured my imagination and brought back memories like this one did. Christopher Nolan has displayed amazing knack for portraying characters in The Prestige, The Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight. Here's hoping that he gives us many more moments of magic. For Heath ledger - May your soul rest in peace.

Chrome plated world domination

2008-09-09T20:35:00.001+05:30

So, Google has released its browser. And if you are one who is wondering why Google released yet another browser when developers are struggling to cope with the four different ones that are already in the market, welcome to the club.

It isn't that the users are going to be benefited either. There aren't many features in Chrome that aren't in the IE8 Beta. For instance, both run tabs in separate processes. Both have a private browsing mode, and both consume tons of memory. Further, IE8 while being standards-compliant, also has a IE7 mode for sites that won't comply by the time the browser is released.

And V8, while being a better Javascript engine, isn't revolutionary. Running apps in secure sandboxes isn't new either.

Nor will Google's clientele necessarily switch to Chrome. From what I know, techies who would be the ones that download and use Chrome nearly never click on ads, while non-techies are generally happy with their default browser, be it IE or Safari. Yes, the percentage of techies who use Google Docs/Spreadsheets may have a better user experience, but again, unless they click on ads, how does Google benefit?

Here is my take on the "how". This is Google's first step towards world domination. I'd written earlier (see the comments) that all Google needed after Docs and Spreadsheets was an OS and a browser that they can ship as default on systems. Not only would you then use Google software, but all your data would be on Google servers, making them indispensable. In addition to really hitting MS revenue sources, this will insulate Google from the low cost of switching that plagues its services.

Welcome, folks, to chrome-plated world domination!

(PS: Needless to say, and like every other post on this blog, this post only reflects my views and should not be construed as being that of my current/previous/future employers.)

A new dawn in Indian sport?

2008-08-24T13:52:00.004+05:30

The cynic in me put the question mark in the title. Otherwise, the events of the past two weeks do point to a new dawn in Indian sport. Over the past few days, I've been making this point at our lunch discussions that Indian sport can only improve from here. As in so many fields, we are probably at the take-off point for Olympic sport and while we may never become a sporting power like China or the US (or even South Korea), 2008 might just be the beginning of more consistent Indian performances in the Olympics as well as other avenues.

Wait, we've still won only three medals, compared to the 96-odd won by the other billion+ country. One gold, as opposed to tiny Jamaica that won six. Even countries like Ethiopia and Cuba did better than us. So, where is the ray of hope?

It is in the quality of performances by both the medalists and the ones that missed. Take a look at the history of the past games. Other than the eventual medal winners like Leander or Rathore, few Indian sportspersons made it beyond the first couple of rounds. Never before did an Indian player take advantage of a repechage to claim a bronze as Sushil Kumar did in 2008. Never before did we have three players in the round of 16 in any sport. And never before did we see an Indian ranked No. 1 in a shooting sport (although he didn't participate, deferring to Rathore). Add Saina, Sania and the archers, and round it off with the large number of international and grand masters that have made it in chess, and even the cynic in you will see that we are doing better than ever in sports other than cricket.

There are two ways to get medals in sport. The first is the regimented way, followed by the ex-Soviets and China where the government and the army play the central role in finding talent, grooming it under government privilege, (threatening it with dire consequences at times), in short, making it a national project. Then there is the free-market way of encouraging people to follow their heart, ensuring competition, and sitting back for the medals to pour in. Given the abilities of our government, the free-market route is the only one we can hope to take. And that, I believe will start bringing in the dividends in the near future.

To hell with you, Apple.

2008-08-23T21:34:00.002+05:30

Should you buy the iPhone 3G? Well, a friend of mine gave me a lowdown on the phone's capabilities in India, and the verdict is simple. If you earn your money like I do, the hard way, don't buy the it.

Why, you ask. Why not buy the most desirable piece of hardware designed for your palm? Well, here is a rundown of reasons:

3G is not available in India yet, and you don't know what prices these operators will charge once it does come up
The previous point is important because like in the US, the iPhone ties you to one operator. You cannot switch (at least not officially).
Your GPS has no driving directions (unlike the Nokia phones) and as a corollary, no audio directions either.
The hands-free kit is extra
There is no option for bluetooth headphones
You cannot increase storage beyond what you're provided.
Price: At Rs31,000 for the 8GB version, the phone is not only four times more expensive than the ones available in the US, it still subjects you to the same conditionalities, of being stuck with one operator.

As someone who fell in love with the iPhone the moment I saw it (many a time I would go to my colleague's desk only to try the touch screen), this has been a major disappointment. I am OK with all the other drawbacks (those of GPS and storage, and bluetooth headphones), but I cannot stand thae fact that I'll still be tied to one operator despite paying the full price for the phone. This is shameful and shows the utter lack of regard that Apple has for Indian customers. Just for this reason, I'll say - "Shame on you, Apple".

Gold medalist and Olympic champion, representing India

2008-08-18T00:03:00.007+05:30

Six words, uttered in less than 10 seconds. But how long had we we waited to hear these words? For how many years, we had seen or heard Indian sportspeople flattering to deceive, missing medals by milliseconds, losing battles that should've been won, even missing to match their own personal bests. But as you see in this video, those days are finally laid to rest. Even as silver medalist Zhu from China wept in dismay, Abhinav stepped onto the podium, becoming the first Indian to do so in individual capacity. I had a lump in my throat as the flag rose, with the national anthem playing in the background. Twenty-eight years of wasted opportunity, with one final redemption.

We are not out of the woods yet. While we celebrate the single gold won by a billion people, we should pause to think why we didn't win in some proportion to our population.

Still, this medal is a landmark event. It proves the fact that we are not doomed to fail in sport. It proves that with the right kind of support, Indian sportsmen and women can bring glory to the country. And it proves, that unlike dictatorships, the only way to produce sportspeople of high calibre in a democracy is through individual initiative, with a supportive role from the government and from industry.

With badminton's Saina, the boxing Kumars, and the shooting stars showing the way, this may still be a new dawn for Indian sport. But is the government listening? Is our nonagenarian HRD minister willing to pull his head out of the reservation muck for long enough to see the faint rays of the morning sun?

If history is any guide, I'd doubt it. However, democracies thrive on individual initiative, and for the first time in our nation's history, we have companies and individuals with the money and the motivation to drive Indian sport forward. Let's hope they come forward and find for us, India's place in the Olympic sun in 2012.

The Sethusamudram debate

2008-08-04T20:50:00.001+05:30

What is the problem with the "Sethusamudram" project? The hullabaloo raised by the BJP, the tamil parties and various other groups over the issue has completely negated the possibility of sane, rational debate on the issue. To make matters worse, the Supreme Court has also issued directives to avoid "hurting the feelings of a community to the extent possible", thus making everyone lose sight of the real (read rational) issues that bedevil the project.

Let's first dispose the issue of the bridge being built by Lord Raama. Now, is it important that Lord Raama existed? Or as the veteran legal brain, Fali Nariman insisted on behalf of the government, is it important that he ordered the bridge to be demolished? IMHO, no. It doesn't matter if Lord Raama existed or not - what matter is whether the bridge is man-made or natural. If there is enough evidence to prove that it is man-made, it is a piece of our history and must be preserved, otherwise, it is 'just' a piece of rock and can be dealt with as such, subject to the other points I'll make now.

The two most important objection that has been raised against the project are its economic viability and the environmental cost. No party in the dispute has really focused on this, although there have been brilliant op-ed pieces in the newspapers. I'll let you read them - they are on the Indian Express website. Bottom-line: the experts think that the project is environmentally disastrous and economically unviable.

If that is so, why on earth are we hollering about Lord Raama, and the Dravida right over the channel, setting rational thoughts aside? Because, my dear readers, that is the Indian way. We love symbolism, meaningless gestures, and endless emotional debates.

What we need is to take a value of out Google - that data talks. That the right kind of data, mixed with the right kind of analysis is the way to take decisions.

The art of Microsoft (R) Windows (TM) programming

2008-07-05T21:07:00.007+05:30

Eric S Raymond has an amazing set of Unix Zen koans here. His book, The Art of Unix Programming summarizes the Unix philosophy extremely well. I've wondered for a while if there was an equivalent for the Microsoft way. The closest I came to was an article by Joel Spolsky called Biculturalism. There were other posts I found on philosophy of specific windows features, but I failed to find anything that describes the Microsoft way of programming.

Recently, we had a talk by Dr. Sundar Sarukkai from NIAS on the "Philosophy of Science". Suggesting that despite it's attempts, science wasn't independent of the observer, and that it had a belief system not very unlike religion, and with its language, mathematics being incomplete, science too was incomplete, Dr. Sarukkai raised a few hackles amongst the listeners. Personally, while I thought that they were all interesting observations I didn't agree with the conclusions he drew from them, but that is a story for another day.

What this talk did though is to force my train of thought towards the station of philosophy - specifically, programming philosophy for Windows. Now, Eric Raymond and Joel Spolsky make the point about the GUI being part of the application instead of being an afterthought (as in Unix), and I agree with that. But a fundamental principle of every Microsoft API is to get programmers hooked with rapid development of basic applications. As early as MFC, you could create a fully functional Notepad application without writing a single line of code. Then there was COM that attempted to hide the complexity of developing distributed applications from you. Today, we have .NET, with LINQ, giving you hidden code generators and attributes for everything from RPC to serialization to workflow management. The underlying principle of all these APIs and platforms is to give users a helping hand when they start, by hiding complexity. In short, a large part of the new Microsoft APIs are tailor-made for the novice-intermediate programmer, who wants to develop a mashup or a cool Forms picture viewer for his grandmom.

This approach has a serious drawback. Because programmers don't have to invest upfront in learning these APIs (instead relying on code generators and other tools/constructs), there is no incentive to learn the basics well. So, when something breaks, or if a programmer wants to do something that the API designer didn't anticipate, he is left high and dry, because he hasn't made the investment in knowing what is happening underneath.

In addition, many crucial features are provided as random attributes or "facts you need to know". Therefore, the transition from a novice programmer to an intermediate one is accomplished by increasing your vocabulary, something developers aren't comfortable doing (I mean, if you could remember things instead of having to learn them, why would you take up computer science instead of history?) Of course, you can turn to your favourite search engine for help, but many times, that isn't sufficient.

The other aspect I've recognized is the preference given to large, monolithic APIs and heavy integration. Of course, it serves Microsoft well to have its tools and APIs jell with each other, but the heavy levels of integration (think for instance, an ASP.NET grid view) and monolithic APIs end up leading to an all-or-none approach that developers are forced to choose between. Customization is next to impossible, and important aspects of the code get hidden from the developers leading to performance headaches and again, maintenance nightmares as the codebase evolves.

I'll update this post as I think of others.

API headaches

2008-07-05T20:45:00.004+05:30

As a programmer, you sure have your favourite API-thrashing story. You know, the one where a destructor fails to release memory held by the object, causing an innocuous leak that is only caught when a million-dollar contract is at stake. The one where you need to call a function twice to use it once. And the one where you sacrifice your types at the altar of someone who thought it would be fun to use void pointers in a public interface.

API design is notoriously difficult. This paper says why. Suffice to say that the task of balancing conflicting requirements, for instance, of power v/s ease-of-use, along with constraints imposed by the target language, by the large (unknown) user base, and of issues like maintainability, extensibility, and performance - you have hell on your hands.

Still, I can't help but wonder why the APIs I use on a daily basis have the flaws they have. Why, for instance, does the Linq Aggregate function throw an InvalidOperationException when I pass an empty list to it. Why, for instance, the DateTime class does not comment what its MinValue is, beyond saying that it is public, static, readonly, and is the minimum possible date. Why, for instance, should the Enumerator be modified to check for end-of-container.

I have similar problems with some language features. The illogical distinction between structs and classes in C#. The whole mess created when operator overloading (specifically, op ==) meets reference equality.

I'm just venting. The C# language and the .NET runtime have amazing utility for programmers and have replaced native C++ as my choice of programming language.

The nuclear deal

2008-06-28T21:49:00.003+05:30

So, what do you need to know about the nuclear deal (I won't call it the Indo-US n-deal), to support or oppose it? Very little, actually. All you need to know is that three parties are opposing it - Pakistan, China and the Indian Communists. If these three oppose the deal, you know it is good for the country. You know you should support it, and support the PM, who finally has got a spine, after four pointless years in power.

Beyond the legalese and all the wrangling, what are the commies worried about? Well, as one worthy said: "The deal will make India a US outpost against China." Now, is that necessarily bad? Wouldn't you sup with your enemy's enemy, just as China has done with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, and is now trying to do with Nepal? Why shouldn't we be a thorn in the flesh of the country that invaded us, still holds on to large tracts of our territory, refuses to acknowledge international borders it shares with us, and let's face it, is our competititor in every field of activity?

Incidentally, when was the last time you heard a left leader or that bastion of leftist writing, The Hindu condemn Chinese intrusions into our territory, or Chinese support for Pakistan's missile and nuclear programs, or even their attempts at encircling India with military outposts? What you've heard, I'm sure, is opposition to India's friendship with the US, opposition to India's relationship with Taiwan (which we still don't recognize, btw), or with India's friendship with Israel. In recent times, the communal nature of the Indian communist was also revealed when one of their general secretaries commented that the Indian Muslims were against the nuclear deal. What better example of ghettoising, generalizing, and internationalising an already targetted community?

However, the biggest farce in the whole drama is the one enacted by the BJP. In sacrificing national interest for petty bragging rights, L K Advani has shown that he's learnt nothing from being Vajpayee's right-hand in the government for six years. Shame on you, BJP, for calling yourself a nationalist party.

It is not Hindu fundamentalism or Islamic that pose India's biggest threat. That 'honour' goes to the commies and the pinkos of the country.

Teen pregnancies. Updated

2008-06-21T21:26:00.008+05:30

Read a Rediff article on the same topic:
http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jun/23mrv.htm

Recently, there was this item in the news, where a group of seventeen "yet-to-turn-16" high school students made a pregnancy pact in the US, and succeeded. The reason? Well, the insidious effect of the coverage that celebrity pregnancies got in recent times. If you keep glorifying unmarried, under-aged pregnancies like that of Britney Spears' sister, and you keep pointing cameras at celebrity pregnancy bumps - what would you expect kids to learn?

A friend of mine who's into fashion, once told me how new fashions were invented. According to him, there weren't many avenues left for creative expression in clothing. So, designers had a choice - either they could drag themes back from the past, or they could shorten or lengthen existing clothes. He gave a very insightful description of how thongs were invented, but in the interest of your stomach, I'll let it pass. Anyway, what was even more interesting was their promotion strategy, which was two-fold: get celebrities to endorse the design, and demean those who stick with existing ones. For instance, to popularize women's pants, they'd associate it with feminism, so that anyone who didn't wear them, wasn't with the times, and was therefore, a supporter of male chauvinism. Similarly, to sell over-sized clothes, you glorify pregnancy, make motherhood the in thing for the times, get celebrities to advertise their pregnancies, and make a quick buck.

Now you know where I'm going with this line of argument. The loonies who control the fashion world, the loonier celebrities who model for them, and the still loonier media that covers these like there is no tomorrow - these are flooding adolescent minds with a steady supply of utter crap. Add to it, declining family cohesion, and the obsession with adultifying our kids to the point that 10-year olds start dictating their parents, and you have situations like the ones Massachusetts is trying to grapple with. With an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex, adolescents who are not in a position to make sound judgements, are ruining their lives and the lives of others, causing serious harm to the health of a society.

Scroll your favourite maps to India. We have a similar recipe brewing in our midst. Will this soup turn as sour as that of the Americans?

Money v/s Work

2008-06-21T20:53:00.002+05:30

Folks who are in the IT field are lucky, in the sense that we are paid well to do something we(hopefully) love. At least, me and many of the people I know in the industry enjoy our work - and some of us do "dream in code". Choices we've made in life would reflect this - we've picked quality of work over money or other considerations, we've always strived, maybe imperfectly, to reach perfection in our work, and we've put team goals above individual monetary gain. However, a question has been bothering me for a few months now: is there a time in life when you should give in, and start looking at the other side of the equation seriously?

It's not that I'm underpaid, or that I feel I don't make enough to sustain a good standard of living in today's Bangalore. But, as you grow older, and hopefully become more mature, you start asking yourself the tough questions, and that is when money comes into the picture.

When I joined my current organization, I took a big hits both in terms of salary and in terms of promotions and 'career growth', all for intellectual and academic growth. Recent developments have made me realize that the compromise on conventional 'career growth' is not a one-time affair, but is something that I'd have to accept as being a long-term phenomenon. As my senior in the org pointed out, I'm now trying to straddle two different boats, and with both pulling in different directions, there is a definite threat of me falling in between. Since one of the boats, that of academic growth is not a very viable option, maybe it is time that I bit the ಕಬ್ಬಿಣದ ಕಡಲೆ and made the switch.

What do you think? Let me know :)

The limits of freedom of speech and expression

2008-06-16T00:29:00.003+05:30

Time and again, I've argued on my blog that free speech is absolute, and that the state or "society" has no business setting limits to the right of freedom of speech and expression. However, I must admit today, that there are limits to those rights.

The first limit is accountability. If you are making a statement, you should be willing to be held accountable for its consequences. Anonymous character assasinations are not covered under free speech. Nor is "hit and run" - false accusations, and change-of-topic when someone responds to a point you made.

Second, is preaching violence. Asking someone to kill, rape or maim someone in the name of religion, caste, ideology or any other fault-line.

The reason I'm pointing it out is because I've been reading some anonymous blog posts about a wing of my organization (search for "minimsft" on your favourite search engine), and the shameless way in which, without responsibility, people have proceeded to character-assasinate senior execs in the company. I'm not saying that the senior execs are all dyed in white (which they might be), but if you are making personal, imbecilic, and crude attacks on someone, the least you can do is identify yourself, so that the victim can respond with appropriate action.

Yeddy, Reddy, Chaddi, and Gaddi.

2008-05-31T12:46:00.005+05:30

So, Yeddy has finally gotten his Gaddi with the help of Reddy and Chaddi. While it means a lot for the BJP and for Yeddy himself, I'm not sure that the message is totally positive for Karnataka. Yes, it is a landmark verdict, and the Karnataka voters have largely done the right thing, ridding ourselves of the Devegowda clan's shenanigans, albeit only temporarily. And while this blog welcomes the new government and hopes that it delivers, it remains unconvinced that the rule of the BJP will actually make a difference for the state or for Bangalore.

Yeddyurappa's own shenanigans at the Vidhana Soudha today - conducting a 6 hour Hindu ritual in what should be a secular seat of power, doesn't give us much hope.

Earlier, Yeddyurappa agreeing to break away from the BJP and begging the Gowda's to give him chief ministership, doesn't give much hope either.

Nor does infighting in the BJP over ministries, nor the fact that the Mining Reddys who spent over 60 crores in this election will demand their pound of flesh.

In today's "ವಿಜಯ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ", ಪ್ರತಾಪ್ ಸಿಂಹ (who is fast becoming my favourite columnist) wrote about the the damage that Yeddy's 'dream budget' has caused to the Karnataka finances. Now, I'm one who says that there is no reason for governments to turn in surplus budgets when farmers are committing suicide, or when large parts of the populace still remains illiterate. However, hand outs are not the answer to the problems facing the electorate. Yeddy doesn't seem to have the mindset required to really bring in the required change. For Bangalore, it is doubtful if Yeddy will override his partymen and restore the BATF.

However, the government hasn't even started functioning, so visit this space in a year for a proper review!

Postscript: This election has really been a mixed bag. While I'm glad that the Gowda family is not in a position to influence the government, and am glad that people like Dharam Singh, the Bangarappa family, and Bangalore's very own Vatal Nagaraj were shown the door, I can't help being sad that an excellent MLA and corporator like K. Chandrashekar (Congress, from Basavanagudi) lost. It is also tragic that the fascist Congress high command overruled its MLAs to deny Siddaramiah the opposition leader's post, instead giving it to a spineless Kharge.

Racism, pigmentism, communalism

2008-05-24T20:56:00.007+05:30

Racism: Why is there such a controversy over the racism (it is really pigmentism* - discrimination on the basis of skin colour) issue in picking cheerleaders (or in asking some of them to leave)? There is already discrimination (let's call it sizeism) in cheerleader selection - why is it that you don't find a fat cheerleader? If your sales item is a body - let's be frank about this - then you have to accommodate the fact that a majority of the people have a certain taste there. In the west, people think thin is sexy. In India, we think white is sexy. Why is one necessarily worse than the other? 'Equal opportunity' does not work everywhere.

I'm not saying that pigmentism or racism is OK in any domain. I'm only making the point that when you are selling beauty, you can't blame people for having a particular taste and for your marketers to cater to it. I've seen casteism and pigmentism at work in my previous company, and believe me, it sucks, even if you are not at the receiving end of it.

Communalism: You may recall how Manmoron lost his sleep when he came to know Indians were involved in the Glasgow blasts, and how (correctly) his 'secular' government fought tooth and nail to get him acquitted. Now, Indian cab drivers are being attacked in Australia, and these are racist attacks, why is the moron silent? Which cat has got his tongue? Why isn't there at least a demarche issued to the Australian mission in India? Well, if you didn't guess it already, it is because the victims are Hindus. If Muslim Indians were targetted, our secular government would have jumped into the fray - now, if a few dozen Hindus are killed out of the 850 million or so around the world, why bother?

* Thanks to a journalist friend for coining the word.

Blatant International Airport Loot Ltd.

2008-05-18T20:45:00.009+05:30

For nearly three months now, lunch discussions in my organization have revolved around the new airport. Last week, I got a chance to preview it first hand - BIAL has a "scheme" to allow MNCs to take teams of employees for a visit, and I signed on. So, what is my conclusion?

As passengers take the first flight out of BIAL, the taxpayer will be taken for a ride.
(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about running an airport, so things may be radically different once the airport actually opens.)

The reason is simple: the airport, particularly the terminal, is not designed to handle anything more than the traffic that HAL airport used to get in the early 2000s. It is tiny, particularly in comparison to what was expected of it. Terminal size of 71,000 square metres is dwarfed even by the Hyderabad airport at 105,300 square metres. And the PR folks at BIAL have the nerve to claim that they can handle 11 million passengers every year, while HIAL with nearly 50% more area claims a modest 12 million. HIAL beats BIAL in aerobridges: 12 to 8, and even in terms of runway width, which our host at BIAL acknowledged is insufficient to handle A380s. The person in question even claimed that no airline was ordering A380s in the near future, saying "why dedicate capacity to something that won't happen in the near future" (paraphrased). Apparently, he hadn't seen this: http://www.livemint.com/2008/01/13235805/Kingfisher-doubles-A380-orders.html, or a million other news items easily accessible from your favourite search engine.

We continued discussions about the airport, and he said that in Phase 2, an identical terminal would be built, taking the total capacity to 50million passengers. Now pray, according to BIAL numbers (which I completely reject), their terminal can handle 11million passengers. If you double of the area, what pot must you be smoking to let you quintuple the capacity!? When we entered the departure area, we were told that the seating could accommodate 1200 passengers, which was definitely a stretch of the imagination. Still, assuming that it can, let's examine the reality. A quick look at the departures from Bangalore between 8:00 and 9:00 PM reveals that there are around 20 flights taking off between those times. Taking a simple number of 70 passengers per flight, we have 1400 passengers. Similarly, peak hour international traffic happens between 00:30 and 2:30 hrs. Anyone who's taken an international flight during those times will testify that the cramped HAL airport had over 1000 passengers during those hours. So, we've already exceeded capacity! How will the airport handle traffic growth, which currently is at 20% per annum?

Now, this is not an accident. Ever since its inception, BIAL has refused to acknowledge the need for higher capacity in the airport, quoting dubious studies, while ignoring the ground reality - 10 million passengers took off last year - and the new airport is claiming to accommodate only 11 million (which, I'll bet is a total lie).

Let's now take a look at its finances. Are the user charges of BIAL, currently at Rs.675/- for a domestic passenger and Rs.975/- for an international passenger are too steep?

Here's a back-of-the envelope calculation. Taking an average charge of Rs. 700 per passenger, and with today's passenger numbers of 10 million per year - we get a figure of 7 billion rupees, or 700 crores as revenue from the measure. The total investment made by the partners is:

Rs 375 crore from Karnataka Govt (32.6%)
Rs 379.5 crore from Indian financial institutions as debt (33%), and
Rs 51.42 crore from the three member international consortium of Siemens Project Ventures, Larsen & Turbo and Unique Zurich Airport

Which means at nearly 900 crores expenditure, the airport venture will break even in the first two years of operating! And without _any_ increase in passenger traffic! OK, they have to pay salaries, there are running costs and utilities, but I haven't considered the revenue they will make out of the airport city, the planned "five-star" hotel, and from all the retail outlets that will be setup in the airport.

In addition, the airport will not allow KSTDC taxies to operate in the airport - what'll become of the livelihoods of those drivers?

These are the issues that Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Mohandas Pai, and the rest of the rabble rousers must raise. Not travel time to the new airport.

On a final note: we went when there was less than two weeks for the airport to open, and finishing work was still on at the airport. Think about it, this is an airport that the company claimed was ready to open on March 31st! Looks like Mr. Brunner has learnt some Indian habits during his long stay here!

Postscript: It is a shame that none of the channels or the newspapers that covered the airport controversy bothered to present a statistical analysis of the airport, instead relying on sound-bites and "feelings". This points to a drastic reduction in the quality of journalism caused by the increasing numbers of those who come in for the "cool"ness of the job, not its rigor. Few journalists today are trained, or are willing to train, to achieve the analytical rigor that a Sainath, a Shourie or a Gurumurthy have achieved.

Freak-o-name-ics

2008-04-30T19:51:00.001+05:30

I was trying to clean up my e-mail a few days ago, when I came across a bunch of e-mails sent by my friends who had just named their children. Now, each generation goes through a different trend of "name choosing". For instance, around the time I was born (will keep both the decade and the year a secret :)), one fad was to name kids after communist leaders. So, many kids were named after Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Che Guevera, and similar leaders. Another was to name kids simple, non-godly names. So, out went the Gopals, the Krishnas, and the Ramachandras, and in came Anils, Sandeeps, and the like. My good friend, (who shall remain unnamed) once told me that in the 70s, there was a movement, not just a fad, amongst Indian Christian families to give their kids Indian names. So, out went the Johns and Michaels, and in came Ajits, Ajays, and the like.

Freakonomics writer Steven Levitt talks about how so many people decide to name their kids using similar "principles". He shows that educational levels are a factor. As are income and upward mobility. (I would go on about this, but you should simply read his book. It is AWESOME.)

A trend I observed in the recent times, particularly amongst my friends, relatives, and distant relatives, is one where they name their kids names starting with the letter "A". Anwesha, Anahita, Anagha, Arya, Ankita, Anandita, Anusha, Apoorva, Ananya, Ayush, to enumerate a few. I wondered, Freako-style, why this was the case?

One answer seems to be that there is a trend, particularly amongst the IT folks, to use Sanskritized names. Maybe, it gives an impression of being in touch with Hindu tradition - imagine, someone asks your kid's name, and you say "Anwesha", you can be sure that the next question will be, "oh, what does that mean?", giving you an opportunity to show off your knowledge of ancient Hindu names. :) Or maybe, just maybe, people tried reading Maneka Gandhi's book of Hindu names from cover to cover, and couldn't get past the letter A! :)

Well, I pitched this idea to a couple of colleagues, and one of them responded: "Maybe the names start with A because they want their kids to become accomplished researchers, and become first authors of every collaborative paper they write!". [Editor's note: If a paper has nearly equal contribution from all its authors, the accepted "policy" is to put author names in ascending order of either their first names or last names.]

So much for working in a research lab! Well, what do you think?

How to become a hero?

2008-04-27T22:12:00.004+05:30

So, you are a politician and this is election year. You've done nothing towards solving big ticket problems in your constituency, or ministry (if you are a minister) for the last four, and now people want to know why they should elect you.

What do you do? Well, simple. You find a trivial issue, sensationalize it, and pretend to solve it by victimizing someone.

Let's see some examples. Our health system maybe in shambles, we may have 74 children out of 1000 dying below the age of five (27 in China), 0.8 beds for 1000 people (2.38 in China), 47% of our children are underweight (10% in China), only 42% of births are attended to by qualified personnel (70% in China), and...well, you get the picture. But our do-good minister of health affairs is not interested in these numbers. After all, how can you explain to the electorate that the number of hospital beds is now 0.82 per 1000 - how will they understand? Instead, you can wage a jihad on something visible - cigarettes, for instance. Not satisfied with banning smoking in movies, and not satisfied with having large skull-and-bones pictures put on packs, our worthy minister even tried to edit old movies to remove cigarettes from them! Luckily, saner minds prevailed. Next, the minister targetted alcohol - the no.1 cause for malnutrition deaths, high infant mortality, and maternity deaths. Now, he is targetting junk food - your next meal at Mc Donalds might actually come with a lecture on good eating habits! Or, the next time you buy a can of saturated fat, you could be made to attend a refresher course on the evils of cholesterol.

Anyhoo, another candidate in this space is the most cultured home minister of Maharashtra. Now, I don't know much about Marathi culture, but if you believed the minister, it would mean antagonism towards bargirls, towards cheerleaders, and towards "modern" clothing, while turning a blind eye to the violence perpetrated by goons supporting one political family. It would mean supporting weird notions of Marathi pride, including burning books written on Shivaji - who in his time, established a kingdom of tolerance and respect. It means targetting the innocent, and letting the vile go scot-free.

India, my friends - the latest "super-power".

National mess

2008-03-25T22:09:00.001+05:30

I was watching "Chak de India" yesterday, with the book "Billions of Entrepreneurs" by Tarun Khanna in my hand, while simultaneously flipping channels to get a glimpse of a debate of sorts about Indian hockey. The movie is awesome, and is right up there with the classic "Remember the Titans", but that is not the subject of this post.

It just struck me that in the same month as the national animal is found to have suffered it's greatest loss of numbers, the national bird lost two dozen individuals and the national sport faced its worst defeat ever.

The conclusion is clear. Anything that gets tagged as "national" in our country goes to ruins. Readers that are old enough might recall the obsession with the electronics industry in the 80s. It was given "national importance" - which led to its suffocation. Programmes like Garibi Hatao that grabbed national attention were a disaster, as were attempts at "nationalization", banks, for instance, forgetting the customer completely. No one watches the national channel (DD-1) unless they are forced to, the national games are a sleight of hand, and our national interest is discarded at the bidding of opportunistic politicians, the nuclear deal being a good instance.

Similarly, our national song is submerged in controversy, our national flag represents how shamefully we allow differential treatment of our citizens, and those who give up their lives for their national cause are treated shabbily.

Is there a silver lining in the national cloud? Probably. Why don't we nationalize garbage? That may cause it to disappear. Or make corruption our national pastime? We could also try making our politicians national animals - they might go extinct then!

Any other ideas?

The case for India

2008-01-27T20:41:00.000+05:30

This is the title of Will Durant's awesome book on India. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, I've been reading a lot of India books lately, and this one is probably the last on the list. Written in 1930, the book, banned by the British government, and God knows why, never resurrected by the Indian governments, is an excellent account of how the country was raped, with the connivance of our own people, for over 200 years by the British.

The figures are amazing. Robert Clive, the resident governor of Bengal, getting an annual tribute of US $140,000, in 1930s money. The national debt of India, which was really caused by twisted pricing of goods, rising to a whopping 3.5 billion dollars by 1929, the cost of maintaining the British army in India was paid by Indians, to the tune of 200 million dollars a year, wars, in which Indian troops fought for the British were paid by taxes on Indians, to the tune of 1.2 billion dollars in the late 1800s, all of these reducing India from the second largest economy in the world in the 1820s to a basket case by 1947.

The book talks of how Indian industry was broken and how farmers were driven to penury in supporting the opulent lifestyles of company and British officials. What is more shocking is the kind of torture inflicted upon the common men by the British:

"A troop of English soldiers had reached the spot, and without warning, began firing into a crowd that had women and children. [...] Some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies. [...] A young Sikh boy stood in front of a soldier and asked him to fire at him, which the soldier unhesitatingly did. Similarly, an old woman [...] came forward, was shot, and fell down wounded. [...] The police snatch off the men's garments, twist and squeeze the testicles, and even batter them until the victims foam at the mouth and become unconscious."

Madeline Slade, an eyewitness, says: "And so we went on from this house to another. [...] 1.Lathi blows on head chest, stomach and joints, thrusts with lathis in private parts, tearing off loin cloths and thrusting of sticks into anus, dragging of wounded by legs and arms, beating them, throwing of wounded men into thorn hedges or salt water, thrusting of pins and thorns into men's bodies..."

What stands out in the book are these:

- The extent of torture and exploitation of the British

- Active connivance of Indians in the British services, including the police force

- The bravery and determination with which "ordinary" Indians fought for freedom.

After reading this though, I started to wonder. As a country, we have such a poor sense of history. Our Moronic PM, intoxicated by a doctoral degree, praises British rule. Common people have no clue about how we won our freedom. Even educated people think the positives of India are the grace of the British.

Read this book. Buy this book. At 140 pages, it is not a long read. And let me know, if like me, you kept wondering whether we have simply replaced a white brute with a brown one after Independence.

Happy Republic Day folks!

Can't dynamic languages scale?

2008-01-26T21:45:00.000+05:30

See this: http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/chandler-failure

BTW, if you don't know what Chandler is, ask for my copy of "Dreaming in Code", by Scott Rosenberg. It is an amazing read, and a must for any software engineer.

If cabin crew were replaced by autodrivers.

2008-01-26T20:47:00.000+05:30

Last Tuesday, I flew to Hyderabad to attend an "Advanced C#" course. My flight from Bangalore was scheduled during the evening rush hour, and we spent nearly 20 minutes at the edge of the runway, waiting for planes to land before we took off.

As I saw the planes land in a single file in front of us, a sinister thought entered my mind: "What if we removed all cabin crew and replaced them with Bangalore auto drivers?"

Well, at first, my plane would have made a mad dash to get on the runway before the last plane landed. We'd have the sight of two planes rushing in a V to get to the lone aerobridge (domestic) in the airport. Cabin crew would snort and turn their heads if you asked them which flight flew to your destination. Your onscreen monitor that shows remaining distance and time would be tampered, and your credit card deducted by amounts much more than the advertised "fare" when you flew.

Oh, in mid-air, pilots would refuse to continue to your destination unless you paid extra.

What else do you think would happen? Use the comments field below.

Postscript: Kingfisher airlines now has a fuselage mounted camera whose footage shows up in one of the inflight channels. Guess what the camera caught on the Hyderabad runway, just as we were about to take off? A couple of dogs taking a break from their rounds of the airport! And the AAI Hyderabad employees have the nerve to protest against the closure of the airport, stating it is against public interest! What do these worthies know about the public?!

Star gazing on a cool January night

2008-01-17T20:40:00.000+05:30

If you didn't know, winter is the best time for star gazers in India. The nights are cool, the sky is cloudless, and throw in a new moon night and a power cut - you have a star gazer's paradise. Turn to the north, and just above the horizon, you see the pole star - our own Dhruva taare. A little away, the Saptarshi mandala or the Big Dipper. Turn your head 90 degrees and you see the brightest object in the sky, Venus, and as you reach the perpendicular, the belt of Orion.

When I was eight (or maybe seven), the science club in my locality got hold of a telescope. Boy, were we addicted!? Every night in winter, we would go up the stairs of my friend's place, position the telescope and keep watching. Of course, the telescope was a manual one, which meant that if you didn't look through the lens in 30 seconds your star was gone (due to the rotation of the earth). We had a pair of binoculars that we could look through, star charts for reference, and even a powerful torch to point at a particular star. To add to our viewing pleasure, the Karnataka Electricity Board (as it was known then) turned off power for half-an-hour at night everyday.

Today, I spent most of the late evening gazing at the stars, and trying to recollect names for them. The pleasure of lying down on your back gazing at the sky has to be experienced to be believed. No wonder early men thought stars were night-time landmarks created by God. Just seeing the stars twinkle away as newer and newer ones grace the skies every minute is simply overwhelming.

Unfortunately, the city has grown so much (particularly towards the north) that many stars that graced the horizon are no longer visible. Maybe one can get a better view from a place like Nandi Hills...hey, I can drive!

What is so great about Python?

2008-01-13T20:35:00.000+05:30

No, I'm not making a statement. I'm asking a question. What is so great about Python? I made some faltering attempts at learning it, mostly through reading the O'Reily book, "Learning Python" and experimenting with some trivial programs.

So, what makes Python so great? Of all the answers I've heard, the most irrelevant and pointless answer seems to be the significance attached to indentation. Apparently, unlike other block-structured languages like C, Python has no delimiter to demarcate the start and end of a block. So, a program that looks like:

if ( x == 0 )
{
printf ("This is crazy\n");
}

would be transformed into:

if ( x == 0 ):
printf ("This is crazy\n");

Apparently, the founder of Python was so frustrated with the poor indentation that many C programmers use that he decided to make indentation a significant aspect of the language. So, why should I, someone who always cribs about other people's poor indentation styles, have a problem with it?

Well, simply because this is a fascist solution to a simple problem that can be solved by a keystroke or a command (depending on your environment). We don't need a language to force us to do this, in the process causing more problems than it solves. Think for instance, you are looking at a 1000-line Python file, and accidentally you hit a tab or a space. A 'worthless', 'invisible' token like whitespace will now give you logical nightmares!

Any other features that are useful?

The GOD delusion

2008-01-12T23:29:00.000+05:30

Update See Dawkins at TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

These are words of Richard Dawkins - author of the "best-selling" The God Delusion. I've mentioned previously about my appreciation for Dr. Dawkins' work - notably, The Selfish Gene. The God Delusion is another classic from his pen. An extremely provocative book, The God Delusion continuously challenges believers of all kinds to justify to themselves their religious values. Why, for instance, do we accept a God that asks for human sacrifice? Why do we accept a God that tells us not to seek the truth?

Richard Dawkins was a good friend of another great author: Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker's guide fame. Both read each others' books many times, and Richard Dawkins gave Douglas Adams' eulogy. Both were(are) atheists. For instance, do you remember this line from the Guide?

"And god disappeared in a puff of logic."

Unfortunately, in the real world, there doesn't seem to be an end to people who would go on believing in the falsehood that there was a God that created us. Some would still believe that the Earth was created in six days, some others may believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old. Well, this is a book worth reading, irrespective of whether you believe or you don't. Dawkins tends to rant a little bit every now and then, but he has kind words for India's founding fathers, believes that the creation of Pakistan is a classic example of the trouble religion has caused, and most importantly, presents a very convincing argument for why we don't need religion.

Read it.

Who is racist?

2008-01-06T23:43:00.000+05:30

http://www.smh.com.au/news/cricket/a-class-act-opinions-differ/2008/01/04/1198950076545.html?page=3 : A piece from the 'secular' Australian media.

And a good riposte: http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/329291.html

Harbhajan is banned on no evidence, every Australian is let off - Sharad Pawar, if you have an iota of shame, bring the Indian team back home.

Disaster at Sydney

2008-01-06T11:01:00.000+05:30

I'm writing this post even as the Sydney disaster is unfolding on my television.

We've all seen how eight to ten crucial decisions have gone against the Indians. We've seen how the 14-member Australian team (Bucknor, Benson and the third umpire forming the new 'tail') has taken gamesmanship to new levels. We've also seen how unsportsmanly Ricky Ponting and his men have behaved, particularly in the fourth innings of the test.

Those interested in cricket history will know that this isn't a first for the Indians. Repeatedly, repeatedly, the Indian team has been at the receiving end of umpires, match referees and other officials.

What is most shameful, however, is the reaction of the Indians, in particular, Kumble. Every time things have gone against India, the players and the BCCI haven't protested. Other than the Mike Dennis incident, umpires, match referees and other officials that have been unfair towards India have gone scot-free. Like in this match. There hasn't been a single word or protest. This match should have been nullified. It should not go into the record books, for the sheer lack of any cricketing law being in operation. But who is taking cudgels on the Indian team's behalf?

This is a test that a rising India will face repeatedly. Questions will be asked of India's determination, not just in cricket, but in politics, defence, economics - to do the right thing. Questions will be asked that will require firm, hard answers. Every nation that aspires to become a sporting, economic or political power faces these: China, on the question of Tibet, Sri Lanka, on the question of Muralitharan's bowling, or the US, on the question of terrorism. Nations that succeed give the right answers, remembering that there is a thin line between churlish protests, and just, effective ones.

India, unfortunately, isn't one such nation. We will burn Mike Dennis effigies, maybe shout from the rooftops about trade barriers, and put our collective heads into the ground when China sets up military encampments in our territory. However, we'll refuse to lodge protests against unfair umpiring, we'll refuse to use our clout in the ICC to get rid of referees and umpires that are against us, while not thinking for a moment in manipulating the system to get a Dalmiya or Sharad Pawar into the ICC chairman's post. We'll let countries like Bangladesh walk all over us, not just in World cups, but also on the borders.

Dhimmitude: something India has honed into a fine art.

(On an aside: There is a small distinction between cribbing and complaining. Kumble did the right thing by not cribbing about lack of match practice after the Melbourne debacle. But not complaining about third-rate umpiring? That too after 8-10 abysmal decisions?)

(Aside 2: I wonder how the Dhoni/Yuvraj/Deepika thing is working out. First, Dhoni walks the ramp with her, is impressed, and invites her to watch him play. Then, the lady in question arrives, rejects Dhoni and 'elopes' with Yuvraj. Now, Yuvraj and Deepika are an item, and with them setting off the 'snoops' in all Sydney restaurants, what is the state of the relationship between Dhoni and Yuvraj?)

Ideology-oriented programming

2008-01-01T21:45:00.000+05:30

Move over, object-oriented programming. Say goodbye to aspect-oriented programming. Bid farewell to the argument between imperative and functional programmers. Godspeed, Noun oriented programming.

All hail, Ideology-oriented programming. Yes, IOP, the latest kid on the block is taking the world by storm, and if you are unaffected by it, you should be ashamed.

What am I ranting about? I forgot!!! Visit this space for an update.

Of love, leagues, and relationships - 5: Ineffectiveness.

2008-01-01T21:30:00.000+05:30

Previously in "Of love, leagues...":
Arthur looked longingly at the perspective gun. Does he dare do it?

Arthur looked around. The cubicles at work were buzzing with activity. No one was looking at him or at Trish, as he called her now. He took aim, the black of her eye settling in the middle of the crosshairs of the perspective gun. An instant later, Trish wobbled, struck by the megamillion Boules of power (brain-joules). Steadying herself, she gave Arthur a look that only she could. Full of hope and fear, Arthur gazed at her quizzically.

"What did you do that for!?", Tricia asked, dusting off Arthur's perspectives. "Why did you fire that thing at me!!!?"

Arthur was taken aback. Naively, he had expected the gun to work; for Tricia to understand how he felt, and reciprocate in some manner. But at the moment of epiphany, he realized he hadn't read the fineprint on the gun:

Not effective on women in love or labour.

The thought brought a wry smile on Arthur's face. Tricia is in love. Fate had just sent him a message. Heeding it, he turned to walk away, when Tricia stopped him. She had a melancholic look in her face. An empathy that only one rejected in love could muster descended on her eyes. Taking Arthur's hand, she said, "I know".

Arthur smiled. It was the end of the road for this fantasy, he thought. Determined to move on, he walked away, when his eyes fell on the e-calendar posted on a far wall.

It was two days to New samvat's, the festival that celebrated 60,000 years of human existence. This was big, and humanity had planned an enormous celebration. Would he be able to enjoy the day?

Surfeit of India books

2007-12-30T22:11:00.000+05:30

Somehow, in the last few weeks, 'India' books have been dominating my reading. I re-read Ramachandra Guha's "India after Gandhi", finished Shashi Tharoor's "The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone", and am reading V Raghunathan's "Why are we the way we are", and have Edward Luce's "Inspite of the Gods" next on my reading list.

It's been fun. All the authors (ones I've read) love India. Their patriotism shines through every word they write. However, each book has a different focal point to its verbiage. Ram Guha's book is more political, placing emphasis on the political history of the country, focusing on personalities (and events) that shaped India, all the while making the point that India remains a single country because of democracy and the vast number of safety valves it offers.

Shashi Tharoor's book is better: the author has an amazing sense of humour, he is a great story teller, and this book is far more about ordinary Indians than Ram Guha's. Shashi talks about Bollywood, Cricket, Hinduism, Gavaskar, Ramanujan, rural womenfolk - in short, everything that makes India, India. I'll post a few snippets after I obtain his permission. But in any case, go read the book - it is a very easy, fun-filled and anecdotally-rich read, something you won't regret in the new year.

If the two previous books gave me a sort of a high, V. Raghunathan's "Why are we the way we are" brought me crashing down to garbage-ridden, potholed earth. In his book, Raghunathan examines, using Game theory, many aspects of Indian behaviour and concludes that our selfish desire to go ahead of our neighbours makes all of us poorer in turn. With lucid and contemporary examples, Raghunathan proves that the India would be a far richer and liveable country if only everyone lived by the rules, even if acting purely in self-interest. A chapter on the management principles of the Gita stoked my curiosity and I think I'll give the great book another read.

If you are Indian, or want to know about India, particularly why we tick (or barely survive), these books are a must read. If I know you, you have it easy: ask me. :)

Happy new year folks. Do keep reading and keep your comments coming.

Year y2008 = new Year( );

2007-12-30T20:32:00.000+05:30

y2008.HaveAHappyOne();

Technology Notes, Vol 1, Issue 5: Software Engineering

2007-12-30T20:07:00.000+05:30

In this issue of technology notes, we'll talk about the software engineering that you should have learnt in your Computer Science undergraduate degree.

Nearly every Computer Science course offers a software engineering subject, usually as a compulsory subject. Typically, topics covered include software development models, phases of development like design and testing, and an overview of common techniques in software development. This subject is usually boring - in fact, in "my time" it was so bad that we actually had a lecturer come and read to us from the text book. I mean, he literally read out the book to us. So frustrated were we at this turn of events that we actually forced him to stop, and suggested that we'd read up that stuff and present it ourselves. Which we did. And might I say, in good measure. However, our takeaway from that course wasn't much more than public presentation skills.

Which, in introspect is bad. Software engineering should be a part of the foundations of any computer science graduate. After all, if you are going to develop software, you should be aware of the techniques that the masters use. However, what the course teaches is not that. The course does not explain how masters develop software. It does not care about quality assurance processes; it doesn't care about real-world issues of large-scale software; the course does not introduce students to the complexities and pitfalls of developing a million-line C++ program. All it does is give keywords. CMM, Agile, Data-driven design, Top-down design, Waterfall, to name a few.

Hopefully, someday, we'll change this.

Modi and Indian culture

2007-12-23T21:41:00.000+05:30

I know, I know, what are the two doing together? Well, nothing. Except both happened today.

I'm no fan of Modi, or of the sort of politics he's accused of employing. However, what has always bothered me is the sort of campaign that has been going on against him. For instance, I distinctly remember the large-scale vilification that was started by some left-wing activists resulting in his request for a US visa being refused. I mean, you can't place the man in the same category as Saddam Hussain, Polpot, and the like! Yes, he fiddled when Gujarat burned, and that is a crime, no less, and if he is found guilty, he must be punished severely - but how are his accusers, one who talked about large trees falling, and another who was proud of how his boys killed dozens of Muslims to 'takeover' a village?

If Modi has really done the sort of development that he claims to have done, this victory is well deserved and is a slap of the face of the pseudo-secularists, the media and the left intelligensia.

Many of you might have watched the long series of dance programmes on the various regional channels, including Sony, Gemini, Star Plus, and the like. What has bugged me, and in fact, the incident that prompted me to write this post is the so called children's competitions that these channels conduct. The children gyrate their hips, making the most decadent moves on screen - and this is not limited to girls only - many of the moves the boys perform are not those I'd want my kids (if I had any) to watch! This is shameful - how can parents let their children dance to such steps?

On Disability

2007-12-05T19:44:00.001+05:30

[Posted using Microsoft Live Writer]

Recently, I read this article in the Deccan Herald in which a former bureaucrat in the disability department of the state government talked about the duty of the civil society towards the disabled. It burnt me up so much that I HAD to write a riposte and bingo, it was published, though in the process, the editors destroyed the intent of my letter.

Anyhoo, if you are interested,

here is the original article:

http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Dec32007/editpage2007120239060.asp

here is the letter that got published:

http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Dec52007/editpage2007120439402.asp

Here is what I actually wrote:

This is in response to Mr. B C Pradeep Kumar's article "Disability and good governance" in the Deccan Herald (DH, 3rd Dec 2007). While Mr. Pradeep Kumar rightly points out that much more needs to be done to bring people with disabilities into the mainstream, he is barking up the wrong tree as far as solutions are concerned.

Let's examine what the state has done for the disabled. Yes, we have reservations for the disabled, and maybe the budgetary allocation has far exceeded the national capita, but what concrete difference has it made to the lives of the disabled? Of what use is budgetary allocation on paper when the disabled don't have ramps to climb into the buildings where they can claim those allocations? Of what use is reservations, when the physical access to the job/education is impossible? Roads in Bangalore are a terror even for able-bodied people - how are the disabled expected to cope? How is a poor, disabled person expected to travel to work, given that even the state road transport organization isn't disabled-friendly?

It has become a hallmark of those in power to talk about lofty principles, on-paper budgets, and commissions that do nothing. What they never had is the empathy or the will to do something, something small that would make a huge difference. Mr. Kumar's article is in the same vein. Programs, Commissions, lofty talk, but no action. The observant reader would note how none of the "progressive" steps he mentions includes basic needs like disabled-friendly footpaths, ramps in public buildings, disabled-friendly buses, and the like. That is the unfortunate reality.

Nostalgia: Radio

2007-12-01T21:41:00.000+05:30

I have been trying to find a line to start this post, but every line that came to mind turned out to be more corny than Sushil Doshi's commentary on DD. Anyhoo, I wrote earlier about 80s television and comics, this time let's talk about Radio.

When I was a child, the radio had the place in the home that the television has today. I don't remember listening to a lot of radio, but I do remember the radio we had - an old GE vaccum tube behemoth that HAD to be connected to the mains to work. The radio broke quite often, generated a lot of heat when it operated, and was quite a sight in our "showcase". Still, my folks loved it, and whenever it broke down, I used to get a lesson in solid state electronics by observing my brother attempt to fix it. It is another matter that the repair sessions also included lessons on the fragility of glass, but they were inadvertant, and will be part of another story.

As I said earlier, I don't remember listening to a lot on this radio - except ofcourse, the 1983 world cup - I was six years old then, and wondered what all the brouhaha was all about, but there was a lot of celebrating and I definitely, had to be a part of it.

My trysts with the radio began when my brother bought a radio with his first salary. It was a neat red-and-black Philips radio that ran on 4 Eveready batteries. A few years later, he bought home a 2-in-1, and that was when the fun began! Every day, we used to listen to "Bhoole bisre geet", "Geet mala", "Aap ki pharmayish", and the likes, and recorded casette after casette of songs. I still remember the announcers say: "Bhatapara se munnu, chunnu, rinki, pinki Andheri se pappu, jhappu, teena, meena, and so on...". A few days ago, I came across a tape on which I had recorded "Yeh Aankhen dekh kar ham saari" and man, did the memories bounce back?

Some more folks talking about similar issues: http://www.anothersubcontinent.com/forums/index.php?s=40e1f3db77de2ce5bf878b8afcc9dd60&showtopic=6191&pid=156331&st=0&#entry156331

Tell me your memories using the "Comments" link below.

(PS: I finally found that Bhatapara is a suburb in Raipur, Chattisgarh.)

The Taslima story

2007-12-01T20:13:00.000+05:30

All the shock and awe over the Taslima story would not exist if only one knew the "Unit of Freedom" of Indian democracy. When the foundation of your democracy is based on the freedom of the Indian people, and NOT the Indian person, and when the foundation of your democracy is the freedom of the mob, you cannot expect that democracy to provide freedom of expression to the individual.

So, to all those comperes who ask the Mullahs and Maulvis angry questions: Look at our constitution. See how it proscribes, in the same breath, the right it gives us. That needs fixing, not the Maulvis and the Mullahs.

Boys, Girls and Science

2007-11-18T23:45:00.000+05:30

Many studies have been conducted on this topic. Many philosophers have wondered why this is so. Many academicians, and academic communities have racked their brains to solve this "problem". What am I talking about? Well, it is the differing interests of men and women (or boys and girls) with respect to science.

Why indeed, 5o years after the gender equality movement, has the ratio of male to female physicists, or mathematicians not changed? Why is it that despite desperate attempts, particularly in the US, not enough women graduate from technical fields? Also, on a complementary note, why is women's enrollment in computer sciences so high, particularly in comparison with other fields in India?

Well, the answer is simple. Evolution has trained women to value social status over academic achievement. Evolutionarily, it was better to be the mate of a high-ranking man than be a brilliant hunter yourself. This guaranteed success of the off-spring, as the man's success determined that of the household.

Now things have changed. However, evolutionary habits die hard. Most women still prize social elevation over everything else. Note the qualifier: "most". There have been (and are) many women who prize academic achievement. But they are the exception and not the rule. So, bottom line, women will go to a field that will enhance their social standing. And for most of them, that is simply what their peers think is nice, or what the men of the day perceive to be "cool".

So, why hasn't women's enrollment in technical subjects increased? Because technical subjects are not perceived as being "cool" in the US. Why is women's graduation rates in technical subjects so low? Because they want to be socially elevated, not academically. And more controversially, why do women flock to computer science courses in India? Because that is the route to social elevation in this country.

Remember that most women who actually get into technical fields in this country rarely stay in them. Even if they do, their levels of accomplishment, in understanding and furthering the field are minimal. [Again, this is true of most women, not all.]

So, why am I ranting about this at 12 midnight? Because I'm fed up of people "encouraging" women in the software field by ignoring similarly qualified male candidates. It hasn't worked, it won't work. Those women who are really interested in getting on the software bandwagon will not need a ladder for it. And those that do, most probably, won't do much getting on the bandwagon.

Technology Notes, Vol 1, Issue 4: Machine learning.

2007-11-18T22:04:00.000+05:30

This week, I'll write about my experiments with time, my thoughts on Machine learning, and a little bit of evolution theory.

* The speed of time

As I was writing my earlier post, "Nostalgia :80s", I kept thinking how time has flown since that time. Well, yes, but how fast does time really fly? I thought a while, and came to the conclusion that it is c. The speed of light. The speed of time should be the same as the speed of light.

What proof can I offer? Well, we know that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light - and time travels pretty fast -so, the speed of time must be c.

On a more mathematical basis: we know that t(v) = t(0) sqrt ( 1 - v^2/c^2). Therefore, when the observer reaches the speed of light, time stops. This means, that the relative velocity of the observer and time is zero - which means, v(time) - c = 0, or v(time) = c.

* The problem with Machine learning

If you are working on speech recognition, face detection, natural language processing or an other field that essentially tries to mimic the functionality of the human brain, you'd probably be using machine learning. Machine learning is the sort of intersection of the human and the computer - a science where humans tell computers how to learn based on vast amounts of solved problems. The deductions made are usually based on sound statistical methods, details of which are available at the wikipedia page.

The technique has taken huge strides in areas such as face detection, speech recognition and machine translation. However, complete success eludes it. Why?

My opinion is that the technique is trying to solve the problem by breaking it into parts, while the problem should be dealt with, at a holistic level. For instance, your brain interprets the whole image, while programs interpret colour encoded as bytes. Or does the brain really interpret the image as a whole? Hard to say. But it appears to be so - it can "understand" that a brightly lit part of a metallic object that reflects large amounts of light still belongs to the same object. It can filter a speaker's voice from the noise in the environment, almost automatically. It can translate sentences between languages taking care of ambiguities in tense, grammar, and meaning.

It'll be interesting to find out if this is really so.

* More choice isn't necessarily good

Don't believe me? See this ad for Vista choices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxLgBx3W9Ss. The sad thing about it is that it is really true. Recently a friend was making a movie in Windows movie maker and wanted to tweak a few settings. He was using Vista Enterprise, and this option - a single menu item that is default with Windows Movie Maker on XP - is available in the Home Preminum (and Ultimate) edition! How on Earth has choice helped the user?

See this talk for a more scientific explanation.

* On evolution

As some of you know, I've been reading a lot of Richard Dawkins of late. I've also been "evangelising evolution". In the process, I found that most people have misunderstandings about how the process works. This is a small attempt to clarify some of them.

First, evolution to create the present set of species has taken millions and millions of years, a time frame most of us cannot fathom.
Speciation (or the development of a new species by evolution) requires a separation between members of a species and a separation of their environments .
Evolution is occurring even today: Why do mosquitoes become resistant to DDT? Why do we need newer and newer strains of antibiotics? Why indeed is the AIDS virus so successful at avoiding every medicine we throw at it? Well, the answer is just one - natural (or in this case, human) selection. When we spray DDT or take antibiotics, we target and kill most mosquitoes(bacteria) in the environment. However, the few that due to some mutation survive, being selected by human selection, have the upper hand in reproduction, and spread the immune gene throughout the population, making the entire population resistant.
Evolution does not happen only by random events: It is indeed true that a hurricane blowing through a garage of aeroplane parts will not assemble a Boeing 747, and it is true that random mutations on their own will not lead to speciation. However, random mutation in combination with non-random natural selection, that selects the fittest, either by killing off the weak, or by having mates choose a particular trait in the other sex.

Have been reading too much evolution. I hope to start reading more Physics from now on. Keep visiting!

BTW, I know my "speed of time" hypothesis is wrong, and if it isn't, I take no credit for getting it right. It was just a random thought that popped into my head.

Congrats, Anil Kumble!

2007-11-18T19:45:00.000+05:30

Better late than never. Better safe than sorry. Similar cliche's would've come to your mind when you heard that Kumble was made Indian test captain.

It may be a stop-gap arrangement, but it is still welcome. For nearly 18 years, Kumble has silently toiled for the country, bowling 50+ overs on a trot in test matches, getting the crucial breakthroughs, and even hitting a century when it mattered.

Congrats Kumble. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving bloke.

Nostalgia: the 80s

2007-11-11T12:26:00.000+05:30

Recently, I was talking to a couple of colleagues when the topic of comics came up. In an instant, we connected over some familiar, but old names: Phantom, Diana, Flash Gordon, Mandrake, Bahadur, and Bela, to name a few. We also talked about their relationships - for instance, being Indian, Bahadur and Bela were _never_ introduced as a couple. They were "friends" who were planning to get married.

This took me on another nostalgic trip. To the times when the world was a lot more innocent than today. When a Ramayan would empty city roads, or when the only movies shown on TV were on Saturday and Sunday. The news ran everyday at 7:00 and 8:30 in the evening. Everyone saw the same programme, mostly on a black-and-white TV. Your TV was usually a Dyanora, or an ECTV, or a NELCO (which was mine). Families gathered around to watch a Buniyaad, or later, an Oshin. A 2-in-1 was a major purchase. Radios and TVs were taxed. I still remember the license my folks had taken, to own a RADIO - not a station!

In all this, my favourite TV serial was "Johnny Sokko and the Flying Robot" or "Giant Robot" as we knew it. This huge robot, controlled by a little kid, was so popular with us kids that we literally dropped everything - cricket bats, gillis, badminton rackets, chur-chand balls, marbles, even stones - to go watch this series. The next day, everyone would be doing the routine - the arms in front of the chest, then pointing upwards, followed by the "rap pa pa" tune, and flying away! Yeah, yeah, I know you want to see it too - here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY0e3aTj3pQ&feature=related

By today's standards, the graphics was crappy, the animation dodgy, and the story lines were like a three-year-old wrote it. Still, we loved it. It was every boy's dream - an adult who would do his bidding! :)

See this for some more memories: http://indrajal-comics.blogspot.com/
http://www.vishalpatel.com/

Arrrrrrrrrrgh!

2007-10-28T00:56:00.000+05:30

My blog is rated "G"! Can you believe it!!!?

Free California Personals

"My" product released!!!

2007-10-28T00:34:00.000+05:30

I'm a little late on this, but a product I worked on has been released by HP in their 11iv3 version of HPUX, in Feb 2007. Why did I find about it so late in the day? Well, I no longer work for HP, and I don't have many chatty, reliable sources in the company either.

Anyhoo, this was a project I joined, one that I led, one that I spent sleepless nights on, and one in which I had great fun. EMT, or Error Management Technology as it is formally called, is an online, searchable, updateable repository of error messages and associated cause/action information. It isn't very big, probably a hundred thousand lines of C++ source, and is a part of a much larger toolset called System Fault Management, or SFM, another project I contributed to.

The reason why I care about this project is that my team went through hoops trying to finish it. We had uphill struggles all the way, but we came through them, mostly successfully :), with the most harrowing experience being what we called the JOEM release - a pre-release version of the product that was supplied to Japanese OEMs. We scored a 4 on 5 for the product, and most of the objections they raised were minor, and were mostly features of the larger SFM toolset.

The joy of seeing your work in the public domain can never be sufficiently expressed in words. It is a thrill ride beyond thrill rides.

See more about EMT here. And remember, I did _not_ write the documentation.

Carbon dating.

2007-10-22T20:23:00.000+05:30

Recently, I've been reading a lot of books on evolution, and carbon dating is one topic that occurs every now and then. So influenced have I been by the process that I had to put it down in some form. Here goes:

BTW, the tagline for it is: I feel I've known you for a million years!!!

Confidence

2007-10-07T21:08:00.000+05:30

What is the most appealing characteristic in a person? For me, amongst the things you can discover at first sight (so, it obviously rules out characteristics like honesty), confidence is the most appealing. I'm sure it is the same for many other people. But here is the question...why?

Let me admit at the outset that I don't know. Maybe because it conveys a sense of fearlessness. Maybe because confident people appear intelligent - particularly in one-on-one interactions. In general, confident people are also usually more convincing. Imagine if Winston Churchill, instead of saying "We'll fight them on the beaches, we'll fight them in France..." had said "um...er...we'll try and fight them on the beaches...er...maybe, try and fight them in France...er..." - would it have had the same electrifying effect on the Britons? Confident people do have a reassuring halo around them...

Interviews are an instance. Except for some utterly obnoxious candidates (my former co-interviewers will testify to having seen many such) who simply cannot backup their confidence, confident candidates do get away with an awful lot.

Coffee table discussions are an other. Time and again, I've been flummoxed by engineers who spoke total B.S, but spoke it with such confidence that my time-tested knowledge (of a very few things) just gave up! Recently, I got into an argument with a colleague about Java v/s C++ performance. As long as we were discussing, he almost had me believe that Java memory management is better performing than that of C++. It took me two reads of his source, a read of the programs mentioned by the source, a few tests, and another paper reading to re-realize what I knew all along - that his source was bunkum.

The point I'm trying to make is the importance of knowing that confidence does not come only from being right. It also comes from not knowing that you're wrong.

A lesson I learn everyday.

(Postscript: While on this topic, I'm one of those guys who thinks that Java can never beat C/C++ in a fair test, but one who also believes that a fair test isn't really possible. We'll always end up comparing apples and oranges. Java has a lot going for it, and it should just leave the performance bit to the Cexperts.)

OneNote is all you need

2007-10-04T00:16:00.000+05:30

Yep. Read it with the "One love is all you need" tune. Nope. I haven't become a fan of "Blue". And yep, OneNote is a Microsoft software which does all you need.

For sometime now, I've been cribbing about usability of Microsoft software, particularly once you take into account how much it costs you to own them. I also have a slew of drafts lined up for you, all criticizing various aspects of Microsoft software, from Vista to Visual Studio. I had earlier cribbed about tables in Word - how you have to pre-create them, and you cannot simply tab your way into creating them. I also cribbed about how you cannot mix content the way you like, how you cannot search into content (images) and so on.

Well, OneNote is here. And really, it is all you need. OneNote lets you put text, handwriting, images, music - and here is the differentiator - where ever you want. Really. And It Just Works! In addition, most content is searchable. Even your handwritten text, or printed text in images. And searchable. And it integrates with Outlook. And you can make sections, pages and the like, as you need. And you have a shortcut in Windows that pops it up for you to take notes when your idea ticker starts to work. And you can tag things, make items in OneNote become Outlook reminders, and in short, do everything you need.

Try it out today - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx?ofcresset=1. This is one software, I'll bet, that will win, well, your mind!

Underworld

2007-08-26T20:36:00.000+05:30

If you are a pre-history buff like me, you'd have wondered what explains the sudden appearance of agriculture, brick buildings, stone masonry and indeed, language and culture in the 4000-5000B.C era. How is it, that agriculture started simultaenously around 4000BC in places as far away as Sumer, the Indus-Saraswati valley and Japan? And if you are interested in mythology, you'd wonder about the persistence of an all-consuming mega-flood that is supposed to have ended known civilizations in Hindu, Sumerian, Judeo-Christian myth, as well as in the story of Atlantis. The flood in which India's Manu, Sumer's Zisudra and more popularly, Israel's Noah constructed arks or boats that protected important knowledge and lifeforms during the flood, and released them again to recreate and repopulate the Earth. You'd have heard of theories that extended from the bizarre (alien contact that gave humans technology) to the plausible (sudden inventions that changed lives drastically).

And finally, if you are interested in Indian history, you'd wonder about the Aryan invasion, about Sanskrit's European origins, and the reasons behind the downfall of the Indus-Saraswathi civilization.

Well, after a long while, I finally started reading the book "Underworld" by Graham Hancock, and it makes a very serious attempt to provide some answers. Using inundation maps of the last Ice Age (wiki, video, earth info), Graham examines the truth behind the various myths. For instance, underwater stone blocks have been found off the coast of Gujarat at the location where the mythological Dwaraka was supposed to exist. According to the sea depth, and inundation maps, Graham estimates its date to be around 7000BC, far earlier than the 4000BC when Indian civilization was supposed to have started. Making use of various geological techniques that predict three super-floods at various ages, Graham makes the case for a single or many post-Neolithic civilizations, that built these (now underwater) cities, that were ravaged by floods caused by the Last Global Meltdown. For instance, it is a theory that the Hudson bay in Canada was a freshwater lake during the Ice Age, whose walls broke down to release millions of kilometers of freshwater into the Atlantic, around the same time when Plato said that Atlantis sunk. With critical looks at underwater, overland, mythological, cartographical and scientific evidence, Graham propounds his theory - that the Pyramids of Egypt, the Stone henge of England, the drainage system of the Indus valley, Siva worship in India, the Vedas, all evolved either at a much earlier time than accepted today and/or were preceded by a period of learning that is lost to us today.

A good read. Although at 700+ pages, it is quite long.

More on India@60

2007-08-19T19:58:00.001+05:30

Earlier on this blog, I wrote that the reason India has stayed together as one nation is democracy. Today, I'll try and refine my reasons some more, and hopefully knit a better weave of the country's unity.

One reason why people of different religions, languages and castes live together in India is because your primary identity can be anything while you can still be an Indian. Consider the case of Pakistan, that split over language or Sri Lanka that is fighting an ethnic conflict whose roots are in language. Now, Tamils and Bengalis are in India. Why is it that they don't want (at least a majority of them don't want) a homeland carved out of India?

It is because the aforesaid countries supressed those languages, discriminated against those who speak those languages - all in the name of national unity. If speaking Urdu became the "Tabbott test" of being a Pakistani, where would all the Bangla-speaking citizens go? If being a Muslim is the definition of being a Pakistani, where can all the non-Muslims go?

When the founding fathers of India rejected the idea of India being a Hindi-speaking, Hindu Pakistan, they knew what they were doing. When Nehru conceded the demand for linguistic states, much against his ideas, he knew that Newton's third law of every action having an equal and opposite reaction applies as much to politics as it does to physics. Which is why, India is a country that does not react to the veils worn by Muslim women (like in France) or the Kirpans worn by the Sikhs. We have learnt that a truly secular state that values freedom of expression, also allows religious expression. We have learnt that the best way to make Hindi a link language is by not forcing it down people's throats (the UPSC for instance, conducts its exams in 18 languages, a record anywhere in the world), but by enriching Hindi with so much content (works of Gulzar, for instance), that it becomes irresistable. And we've learnt, sometimes painfully, that patriotism has nothing to do with being a Hindu, or speaking Hindi or even being religious. Consider for example, the case of our Lok Sabha speaker, who is a firm atheist. You don't find anyone contesting his patriotism!

What is the root of such tolerance? Or maybe tolerance isn't the right word - it should be acceptance. Why is India a country that accepts everyone? Is it a product of the freedom movement, or is it even more deeply rooted? I'll examine this in my coming posts.

Stay tuned.

If only women ruled the world...

2007-08-19T19:28:00.000+05:30

The one line every feminist loves. Talk about anything that is wrong in the world, and whenever you have a feminist in the audience, this is a line you'll hear. If only women ruled the world, there would be no conflict. If only women ruled the world, disputes would be solved over shopping trips and not through wars. If only women ruled the world, there would be no global warming. And no endangered species. And no poverty. And no inequality. And no world hunger. And this world would be a happy, bubbly, green, lovely, peaceful place to be in.

Pointing out that the record of women rulers doesn't really justify this claim never helps. It only marks you out as a male chavunist, a wife (or girlfriend)-basher, a neanderthal, and in general, a jerk who doesn't deserve to be in the modern age. Pointing out that the only prime minister to impose the emergency in India was a woman, doesn't help. Pointing out that the most dictatorial leaders in the country are women - Jayalalitha, Mayawati - to name a few, doesn't help. All you get is the standard response - these women have to behave "like men" because there aren't enough women around. Oh, and the 33% reservation for women is going to fix this problem.

A recent report by CNN-IBN on ragging in colleges has shattered this myth. While the instances of ragging in boys were terrible, they were only as bad as those committed by women. See, for instance, the story of Indu Antos, who committed suicide after being ragged by her (female) seniors. Now, in a group where women are in a majority, why is a fellow woman being harrassed to the point of committing suicide?

Now, I'm not making the claim that men are all non-violent, and peace-loving. My only claim is that positions of power - whether it is obtained through politics, or by means of being a senior, or through other means - corrupts, and it corrupts people who are susceptible to it. Men and women are equally likely to be infected and this is entirely an individual's characteristic, not that of a gender. Having women in positions of power is no guarantee that either the lot of women will improve, or that the lot of the world will. What is guaranteed to happen is that the lot of the women in power will improve.

Maybe that is a cause worth fighting for.

Missing the golden oldies

2007-08-12T19:50:00.000+05:30

One huge tragedy of LPG (Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization) has been the loss of a wonderful singing tradition, particularly of patriotic songs. The crap that circulates today in the name of patriotic songs simply makes one hang his head in shame. I don't want to grant them respect by mentioning them here, but suffice to say that they are nowhere in the class of the golden oldies that Rafi and Manna dey, with Lata and Asha breathed their voices into.

For instance, take the song "Kar chale hum fida jaan aur tan saathiyon" - rendered in Rafi's immortal voice. One line of the song goes thus: "Kat gaye hamare sar to kuch gham nahi, sar himalay ka hamne na jukhne diya" Or the ever melodious Manna dey singing the soulful "Aye mere pyaare watan" in which Gulzar mourns "Chood kar teri zameen ko door aa pahuche hai hum. Phir bhi hai yehi tamanna teri zarron ki kasam - hum jahaan paida hue us jagah hi nikale dum" - can you resist getting goosebumps? Or why, a little Asha singing Kavi Pradeep's "Jis din teri chita jali thi roya tha mahakaal - sabarmati ke sant tune kar diya kamaal." (When your pyre was lit, even fate cried, O saint of Sabarmati, you did a miracle.) Or the 1940s song "Aaj himalay ki choti se phir hamne lalkaara hai - door hato door hato door hato aye duniya walo hindustan hamara hai". (Today we've given a clarion call from the Himalayas - quit, you foreigners, Hindustan is ours.)

The lyrics, the music and the singing of the time all combined to give a surreal feel to these songs. Sixty years after independence, someone born thirty years after the day can still feel the sentiment of the freedom movement. That was the greatness of the era - the songs tugged at your heart - not at your purse-strings.

Will those days come again? Or will the next generations grow up on utter crap like "It happens only in India" or "Sandese aate hai" and think they are great patriotic songs!?

India@60

2007-08-12T00:45:00.000+05:30

So, yet another decade of Indian independence. What is so great about it, you ask? Few countries are under a foreign yoke anymore, many are doing so well economically and socially, with countries like China kicking our backsides when it comes to economic growth, poverty alleviation, and indeed any aspect of social or economic development. Our venal politicians and bureaucrats leave no stone unturned in shaming the country, while we grapple with problems of both the 18th and the 21st centuries simultaneously. Still, this is a day of celebration. Still, this is a day when we must be proud to be Indians. It is a day when we must stand up and say with a lot of justification "मेरा भारत महान"। Why? you ask. Why, suddenly, has Mr. cynicism become a patriot?

Well, one eye-opener for me was the movie "Sometimes in April" - a movie about the Rwandan civil war. There was nothing civil about it, believe me, and the Hutu attempts to wipe out the Tutsi was so blatant, that it shocked the living guts out of me. A million people were killed, nay butchered in three months - all because of racial difference. This got me thinking - what if we in India were to fight out our differences? What if we were to resort to genocide to flatten our linguistic, racial, financial ethnic, religious, casteist, pigmentist (thanks to a friend for this one), regional, tribal, sectarian, fault lines? How many civil wars would we have witnessed? How many millions would've died? What effect would it have had on the rest of the world, if a billion of its people fought like animals?

It is not that India has been strife-free! We have had riots, killings, revenge-killings, protests, and what not! Our history of 60 years has been blood-stained on many an occasion. Still, we remain as one country. Why?

Really, the only plausible answer seems Indian democracy. Even with all its warts, and all its deficiencies, democracy has given every Indian (well, truly speaking, every Indian mob) the freedom to shout, the freedom to block roads, to vent their anger, the freedom to stop trains, to mob people, and in general, do anything except secede from the Union. So, while the Indian individual is still deprived of the right of expression, the Indian mob, which really is the unit of most turmoil, is given a free reign, which allows grievances to be settled with that very typical Indian "jugaad". People therefore obtain a stake in the system, which allows it (and the people in it) to flourish, as our billion-plus population attests.

I remember, visiting Austria when I was working for a German software company. There, our counterparts (Germans and Austrians) quizzed us on what united India. I mean, the seven members in my team spoke a total of nine languages (Kannada, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Konkani, and English), we had representatives from two major religions, and were from five different states. So, why were we in one country? What made us Indian? I had no answer. I mumbled something about Cricket, and Bollywood, but I'm sure the Indian spirit goes deeper than that. So, while I investigate it, why don't you express your thoughts through the comments field?

Have a very happy Independence Day (in advance). Oh, and for the RNIs, just a reminder, the Indian Independence Day is on August 15th, despite Bill Pullman's exhortations to the contrary.

Random thoughts

2007-07-29T19:24:00.000+05:30

I haven't blogged in quite a while, and the best way to get back into blogging is by jotting down random thoughts, ain't it? Well, here comes another edition of chaos.

Why do we find it so hard to innovate?

I had lunch with a good friend of mine recently, and our conversation veered towards the lack of innovation in the company he works for(which incidentally was mine a year ago). We had some thoughts on the subject, and on my way back to work, I kept wondering why we didn't have world-class innovations from India, particularly in the software field in which we're supposed to be so strong. There are a few reasons we all know - don't we? As software engineers, we are trained to write software that implements a spec. We are trained to re-use, to borrow readily available code/design, and to think in patterns. None of which are characteristics that encourage innovation. There is also our education system, my favourite whipping boy for everything that is wrong in the software field. We are not encouraged to tinker, we are not encouraged to find our own answers - instead, we learn, by heart, answers handed down to us. What better way to kill the innovative spirit?

File your opinions through the comments link below.

The Ancestor's Tale

This is another "wow" book by Richard Dawkins. I'd read his Selfish Gene, Extended Phenotype, Unweaving the Rainbow earlier, and this is a wonderful progression of Dawkins' talent. The Ancestors Tale recounts the story of evolution, going back in time to trace the lineage of the human species. The book is full of facts, evidence, and anecdotes - not to mention the occasional funny diatribe against Bush, Creationists, and their ilk. As usual, Dawkins writes marvellously well, and while there are sections of the book that a non-biologist (me) may find tough to understand, they are well demarcated, and don't interrupt your understanding of the rest of book.

Dreaming in Code

I wouldn't have heard about this book by Scott Rosenberg if it wasn't for my favourite software blogger, Joel Spolsky. While Dreaming in Code is a biography of the Chandler project, it goes beyond just that, giving the reader wonderful insights into why Software is HARD. Why is it, that 50 years after the first high-level language was invented, we still don't have a language to convert requirements into code? Why is it that, 35 years after Dijkstra announced that the "Goto statement was harmful", we don't have a language that'll minimize logical errors? And why is it, to quote the immortal words of Fred Brooks, there is indeed no silver bullet in software engineering? The book revisits these questions, and asks a few more of its own. For instance, it questions the logic that software should be more like civil engineering, it describes the problem with leaky abstractions, and the undecidability of verifying software. While I don't want to say that it is in the same league as the Mythical Man-Month, it is a must read for every software engineer.

Here, I want to make a small point. Software development is about people. It is not all technology. It is about people deciding to do the right thing everytime they put their hands to the keyboard. It is about embracing quality - as Harsha Bhogle eloquently describes in this video. It is about perfecting the basics - remember the "wax on, wax off" lesson from "The Karate Kid"?

Tools can only help. Ultimately, software is all about people. While you are reading this, also take a look at code reads - the collection of trend-setting articles by Scott Rosenberg.

Thank you, Dr. Kalam

2007-07-22T23:12:00.000+05:30

Folks, it is official. The cunning descendant of Mussolini has had her way, and Dr. Kalam is out of office. This post is just a dedication to his abilities, his turning the presidency from an institution of pomp to that of the people, and his integrity, good judgement, and tireless efforts towards an India that'll make us proud.

Good luck, sir, for all your future endeavours!

What nice are you? Updated!

2007-06-29T23:26:00.000+05:30

No, I haven't had damage to the grammatical hemisphere of my brain. It is just that there are various ways to be nice. And in this post, I'll enumerate some of them:

Ignoring nice: This is the American way. Everybody smiles at you - not just a : but a real :), but no one really cares. So, you may see a cute girl jogging on the road, smile at you and say "How you doin'?", but don't let it brighten your day, because before you can think of something nice to tell her, she is out of audio range.

Phony nice: Similar to ignoring nice. This is the nice that is put on by people putting you down, albeit softly. The lips are drawn into a smile, but the brain hasn't changed the tone of the voice - which is usually the giveaway.

Patronising nice: This is how some brilliant people respond to ideas suggested by lesser mortals. Their upbringing won't let them be harsh or rude, and at the same time they don't want to give credence to a remark made by someone who is clearly a lesser human being. So, they smile, nod, pretend to listen, and thank you for your comments, while their brains are trying to solve a completely unrelated NP-hard problem in polynomial time.

HR Nice: This is the easiest one to understand. One of the traits taught by every management school to every HR major, HR nicety is keeping a large smile on your face, saying "Hail Caesar" with a really sweet voice, while stabbing Caesar in the back. Beware of the HR smile. It usually means "I'm screwing you" or "I'm making you screw yourself". Note how the HR smile is never accompanied by a "no". You could call the HR person a jerk, a whatchagonnacallit, but he or she won't lose the smile. The one drawback of this smile is that it is universally employed, and therefore can be detected with the greatest ease, while putting up the smile facade expends enormous amounts of energy.

You know of any more? Post them in the comments section.

PS: While you are at it, try looking for an "updated" logo on the net. Some picture with the "Updated" text in it. It should expose a lot of the limitations of today's search engines :)

More Moron talk

2007-06-03T18:14:00.001+05:30

Prime Minister Manmoron Singh has finally done it. He's taken off his reformer's mask and is now baring his commie claws. In a recent address to the CII, he gave them a ten-point agenda for reform. It read like a pimp blaming the police for prostitution. Here it is, with rich and decadent me ostentatiously embellishing it with my comments.

One: have healthy respect for your workers and invest in their welfare.

Yeah, right - let's see...how many training programs does the government conduct that trains postmen to become something better? How many programs offer education to the gangmen of your municipal corporation. How many even train teachers, or for that matter, IAS officers? How many government buildings have ramps and toilets for the disabled - a bare minimum to give them dignity?

Two: corporate social responsibility should be defined within the framework of a corporate philosophy which factors the needs of the community and the regions in which a corporate entity functions.

Again, what about government social responsibility? Oh, as long as we keeping bellowing "aam aadmi" from the rooftops, that is taken care of.

Three: industry must be proactive in offering employment to the less privileged, at all levels of the job ladder.

No problems with this one.

Four: resist excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives and discourage conspicuous consumption.

Moron, how moronic can you become? If CEOs were a dime-a-dozen, and your dumb government had created more good IIMs (or let the pvt sector create them), instead of fighting over reservations, CEOs wouldn't be getting such salaries. Well, at least they are accountable. Why don't we compare all the official and unofficial perks your colleagues get, without any accountability for their performance? Why don't you talk about that? Further, what will this commandment serve? The poor? Do you really think that the farmer who committed suicide in Karnataka compared his state with that of Vijay Mallya before succumbing to the rope?

Five: invest in people and in their skills.

Like number 1. It's infact more than a coincidence that Moron was a teacher. Preach, but don't practise is his firm philosophy.

Six: desist from non-competitive behaviour.

Heh heh. Mandating roaming call rates in a competitive market is not non-competitive. Putting road-blocks to private investment in airports under the guise of stupid laws - well that is competitiveness at its best. Moron, JRD is no longer alive. And while people like Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji keep his flag flying high, it is up to your government to have a competition commission that works. Where is it?

Seven: invest in environment-friendly technologies.

No problems with this one too - but why aren't you doing anything about it, Moron? President Kalam had such wonderful ideas - why aren't you having them implemented at least in the Congress states? Why didn't you give a 100cr grant to IISc with a mandate to come up with a 50% efficient solar cell in 3 years? Why doesn't your government attempt to cut-down its energy usage and set an example?

Eight: promote enterprise and innovation, within firms and outside.

No qualms with this one.

Nine: fight corruption at all levels.

Look who is talking.

Ten: promote socially responsible media and finance socially responsible advertising.

Same as point 5 - about conspicuous consumption. Simply ridiculous.

All Moron is doing is lay the blame on someone else's doorstep. The doorstep he should lay the blame at is actually in 10, Raisina Hill, but unfortunately, that is akin to visiting a lioness whose lions are thirsting for his blood, and therefore you can expect to see more moronic speeches like this one in the times to come.

Attack of the PRTG

2007-05-28T20:27:00.000+05:30

Or the Pseudo Random Thought Generator. I've taken a blocation (blog + vaction) for a few weeks now, and my mind is full of random thoughts, none of which seem to expand into a nice, modular post. Instead of me going through the torture of making a readable post out of them, I decided to simply put you good folks through it.

* Familial teams

Have you heard the phrase "You folks are like family to me (sic).", typically from an Indian? Somehow, we Indians assume that the family is the highest unit of social cohesion. Is that really the case? Did we choose our families? Did we choose our parents, our siblings, or our relatives? Isn't that simply a function of the gene, as opposed to relationships we cultivate - most notably friends? Why is it that a genetic relationship is deemed higher than once that we chose? Why must the "meme" which is biologically more powerful than the gene, get a higher pedestal?

Anyways, that is not the point I want to make. The next time you hear someone (most typically a supervisor) tell you that he thinks you're family, quit your job, change your home and run; run like your life depends on it. Because what the supervisor is really saying is that he thinks he is the "head" of the family (and that you're the tail), and he'll be the only one making all the decisions, and if he ever quits, he expects you (after all, don't family members move if the head moves?) to follow suit.

(PS: Before you guys get any great ideas, no, I'm not against families, and my own family and relatives are a very nice bunch. Thank you.)

* The hardest thing about being a mentor/coach

For a long time, I thought the hardest part of being a coach or a mentor, or a team/tech lead would be giving negative feedback. It is still high in my list, but I've found something harder. And that is to keep your hands tied when there is cool work to be done. To let your team-mates pickup the cool feature, or the delicious design, or the simply salivating opportunity to work on a hot new piece of technology: all this while you remain on the side-lines, wringing your hands in (mock) despair. That is really hard. For one that believes that the only worthwhile contribution to a project is in its engineering, this is especially hard on me.

Growing up in socialist India - 1: Television

2007-05-16T19:03:00.000+05:30

Recently, I came across a MIT student video of the song "Mile sur mera tumhara", which took me back in time to the glory days of socialist India. Now that most of my colleagues grew up in what became "pseudo-capitalist" (or pseudo-socialist, for those appropriately inclined) India, I thought it'll be nice to recall some of the things of the "good old days".

Now, my family was a middle-class one - which meant that my folks probably had enough money to send my brother and me to school, and they probably had spare cash for buying a bicycle, but it also meant that I had to go on hunger strikes to get a TV in the house. Yes, our first TV, installed on 24th June, 1984 was a result of my weeklong hunger strike (during which I got ample servings of non-food items). And what could you watch on it? Well, there was the eternal favourites - Mahabharat and Ramayan, and kids had He-Man, Giant Robot, and an assorted set of cartoons. Adults watched "Yeh jo hai zindagi", "Hum log" and "Buniyaad" - which to my mind were totally wierdo serials.

But what was unique to the socialist experience were films created by Films Division of India on national integration. Most of them (except those created by Louis Banks - Mile sur, and Bhaje sargam to name two) were crap. The animations sucked, the voice-overs were terrible, and each of them had this preachy tone that was so representative of the governments of that time.

Of all the serials I watched on the tube then, the one that still remains in memory is "Oshin". This must have been the most heart-rending serial I've ever seen.

Anyway, more info about such shows here: http://full2faltu.wordpress.com/?s=Woh+Bhuli+dastaan. Do write in about your favourites.

Of love, leagues and relationships - 4: The perspective gun

2007-05-08T20:26:00.000+05:30

The perspective gun is a marvel of human ingenuity and innovation. When fired, it causes the victim to see the wielder's point-of-view on any issue - in a sense, it puts the victim in the wielder's shoes. However, readers should not confuse the perspective gun with the "walk-in-my-shoes" gun which literally puts the victim in the wielder shoes - by disassembling the wielder's and the victim's feet and interchanging them through a molecular transportation unit. The gun was doomed when a Vogon general, trying to use it on a human, discovered that using the "WIMS" gun caused him such trauma that it was second only to the effect of his poetic rendition. Later, the Vogon Central Command ordered the confiscation and destruction of every bit of the gun, an order that was carried out to the last nut and bolt.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the perspective gun. While the gun itself is very well-known, not many 'people' know the secrets of this weapon, and still fewer know its origins.

The perspective gun operates by targetting those brain waves that are generated by emotions, amplifies them and fires them at its victims. The amplified emoaves, as they are known, interfere with the natural emotions of the victims creating in them the same emotions as are present in the wielder. Still interesting, is how the perspective gun was invented. This was the work of one brilliant Indian scientist, Mankutimma, who in the year 2150 decided that he had to put all the emotional energy of his country to good use. Dr. Mankutimma had seen for himself how for eons, his fellow-citizens spent good ATP molecules on emotional issues, and how, broken temples, loss in cricket matches, and marriages between movie stars would induce extreme emotional energies in large swathes of the population. He started work in his private lab, working late-nights to create a transducer that would automatically convert emotional energy into electricity. After years of research, he came up with the EmoVac - the vaccum that would suck up emotions to generate electricity.

Dr MK also discovered an interesting side-effect. He found that he could take the brain waves collected by the transducer, amplify it and direct it towards a target. This, he found brought about an immense change in the victim, much akin to the effect that emotional dependence has on human beings. The victim began to understand the wielder, he began to empathize with the wielder's emotions, and gradually, himself became emotionally dependant on the wielder - to such an extent that the victim could no longer live without the wielder's presence and approval. This was a brilliant move - imagine how many wars you could win by simply forcing the opponent to agree to your point-of-view! Imagine how many arguments could be solved by making the arguees see each others' points-of-view? Dr. MK was excited and he went public with his invention.

The furore that followed was unprecendented. Human rights organizations protested against what they called violation of the right to free thinking. Animal rights organizations protested against the pain that animal test subjects of such a weapon would endure. And no amount of protesting by Dr. MK could convince the world that his weapon was actually a peaceful one.

Finally, the World Security Council setup a Mental Weapons Convention - the first of it's kind since the Nuclear Weapons Convention that closed down in 2050, to draft guidelines for the usage of this weapon. The convention came to agreement that while the gun itself wasn't undesirable, it's effects should be temporary, and suggested that the strength and duration of fire of the guns be fixed accordingly.

Even as the guidelines were being drawn, Dr. MK met a old friend from the country of England, and a few friends of his, and flew out of Earth, the perspective gun in hand. A few Earth-days later, the planet was destroyed, this time in a chilling game of pool, during which, as residents of the cue ball, the last sound earthlings heard was a resounding "thok" as the planet hurtled towards a orange-yellow 9-ball situated 9 light-minutes from it.

Arthur looked longingly at the perspective gun. Does he dare do it?

I haven't been well for nearly five days now, and even as I struggled to sleep every night, this story kept coming back like a recurring dream. So, I had to write this out, even though my temperature is hovering around the 100 mark, and I'm upto my neck in antibiotics.

Don't be evil???

2007-05-04T19:37:00.000+05:30

Earlier I wrote a couple of posts about Google's "Don't be evil" (Don't sup with evil) motto. I had written about how Google wanted world domination, and could sup with evil if the price was right. Today, my good friend Mohit pointed me to a Google NDA that is a whole new form of evil. The essence is that Google explicitly forbids interviewees from talking about anything they ask in the interview. And this includes explicit questions about the competition: which in essence means Microsoft. Apparently, Google India is terribly interested in the activities of Microsoft Research India - they don't miss any opportunity to interview interns from MSRI, and ask them explicit questions about what they are working on. Ofcourse, they are forbidden from divulging this even to their moms!

Thank you, Google. You've finally shown your true colours.

On the topic of marriage.

2007-05-03T00:32:00.000+05:30

All these days, I have desisted from writing about (my) marriage (or rather its prospects and experiences) on this blog. And other than a couple of posts, one where I introduced my current love interest, and the other where I mentioned her, I've generally maintained silence on the topic of love.

Have you ever been the last man batting at the crease, or one amongst the last pair in a cricket match? If you have, you'll appreciate how tension-filled the entire situation is. Here you have your 10 folks hoping and praying that you last (or praying that you don't so that they can go home), while you have the opponent trying his best to get your wicket. You're stuck in between, trying desperately to keep your averages at their current level.

My situation w.r.t marriage is similar. Depending on which team I'm playing for, I'm either the "last man batting", holding out for the bachelors, or I'm the non-striker in a last-wicket partnership for the bachelors. (Yes, I sense the irony in the statement.) This makes my parents, relatives and those of similar disposition really nervous. Now, they are in the stands, cheering on, not for my continued stay at the crease, but for my instant demise and return to the pavilion, where they'll force me to join the opposing team. Leading the attack on the opposing side, is a whole host of friends, well-wishers and generally-known people, all of whom are determined to get my wicket. Just today, I was playing for my primary-school team, and the striker got out - clean bowled to a well-pitched-up googly. As the last man remaining, I had to hide my face and get out - lest he run me out with the aid of some unheard-of rule. (Remember, even the umpires support the bowling team.)

What compounds the 'tragedy' (quotes intentional) is that one of my best team-mates has now left and joined the opposing team. While I'm really happy for her, what gets my goat is that she is now spear-heading the bowling attack - even colluding with one spectator to get me out!

So, here is to batting through the year! It is still early days...

हिंदी में ब्लोग?

2007-04-21T23:58:00.000+05:30

मेरे दोस्त बलबीर ने कहा कि अब हम हिंदी में ब्लोग कर सकते है। यह, गूगल कि बड़ी अच्छी सुविधा है
और यह ट्रांसलेशन इंजन बहुत अच्छी तरह काम करती है!

शाभाश गूगल

Terminating Arthur for now

2007-04-21T23:48:00.000+05:30

For the last three weeks, I've been trying to get Arthur to do something funny. That hasn't happened, and I'm also running out of story ideas - so Arthur stands terminated for the time-being. Hopefully, if I call pull-off a resurrection (oh, how he would hate to hear this word), I'll re-instate him again.

Pseudo Engineering

2007-04-21T11:01:00.000+05:30

I was watching a programme on Animal Planet yesterday. The objective of this programme was to get four engineering students to engineer some artifact of nature. In yesterday's programme, it was the Spider web.

The Spider web is an amazing work of nature. Strands of some spider webs are known to be stronger and more elastic than a steel strand of the same thickness. In addition, the 'architecture' of the spider web, it's spiral construction, and the entire biology behind it, are all simply amazing.

But back to the programme. The four students had to build a spider web on a 60'X40' scaffolding. Yes, you got it right - a 60 foot-by-40 foot scaffolding. The team would then 'trebuchet' a 25 pound weight into it, and the web had to be strong enough to catch it. Further, beyond the obstacles posed by the task, the students also had to contend with the winds blowing in the Sydney harbour.

Needless to say, I was mesmerized. "What a cool assignment", I thought, but as the programme progressed, I just got more and more frustrated. The programme was not about engineering a web. It was about showing the 'cool' side of engineering, with cute babes (and hunks, for those inclined), and some 'action' - like having people bungee jump from a 60 foot scaffold or hurl washing machines in the air. Why am I so disappointed? Because while there are no two words about engineering being cool, there is a lot of sweat that goes into making it look cool. There is a lot of math - for instance, you are aiming at a web, that is X feet away, with a trebuchet that can throw a ball of weight M with a force of J Newtons. You have wind blowing at an angle theta with a velocity of v kmph. Now, what are the angle/distance/power metrics for your trebuchet so that the ball hits the centre of the web? Calculating this is engineering. Not random testing the final version by firing away to glory, or having your only claim to math being a spreadsheet that never gets used.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. I don't know. Why don't you tell me through the comments link?

Awesome joke

2007-04-14T21:13:00.000+05:30

Stallman, Linus and Knuth walk into a bar

Stallman says - "God said I made the GREATEST editor ever "

Linus says - " God told me that I made the divine OS , the GREATEST kernel ever ... "
...
.....
........
...
...
...
..
..
..
.

Knuth says - "Wait a minute, I don't remember saying that "

Unit of freedom

2007-04-14T13:45:00.000+05:30

What is the unit of freedom in your country? Perplexed? Read on...

The unit of freedom is the smallest group of people in your country that enjoys freedom. For example, if you are in the United States, the unit of freedom is the individual. If you are in Communist China, the unit of freedom is the party. And if you are in France, the unit of freedom is a union. (I'm kidding.) And if you are in Pakistan, the unit of freedom is the local mosque.

So, what is unit of freedom in India? That is a no-brainer. The unit of freedom in India is the mob. It is the mob that is free - to avenge some weird insult to ridiculous pride by stoning glass buildings, it is the mob that is free to prevent a Hindu girl marrying a Muslim boy, and it is the mob that is free to slaughter farmers in the name of development. It is mobs that decide what insults national pride, it is the mobs that decide who is on the right side of justice, and it is the mobs that decide who has a right to live.

You disagree? Post your disagreements in the comments below.

Personality CMM

2007-04-09T01:15:00.000+05:30

For anyone associated with Software Engineering, the three letters CMM either evoke knowing smiles or unknowing deference, depending on whether the person has gone through a CMM review or not. Well, that was the Software CMM. On similar lines, we have the People-CMM and now, CMMi - Integration CMM for system companies that do both hardware and software.

Needless to say, these CMM models have kept many consultants in business, provided opportunities to many researchers to add to their list of papers, and has in fact, created a new haves/have-nots situation w.r.t software companies.

All the models have the same five levels: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimizing (wiki here). Each level has a list of processes (KPAs) that must be in place for an organization to attain that level. I won't go into the details here, except state the obvious - the latter levels are 'better', and the higher the level an organization achieves, the more mature it is supposed to be.

This got me thinking - aren't people the same? There are people who defy age - they are 3-year olds as long as they live. And there are some who keep improving even when they are in their 90s. Not very different from the CMMs. Therefore, I present to you, my contribution to the CMM stable: The Personality CMM

I'll describe the Pr-CMM in greater detail in the coming posts. For now, here is a broad definition of the five levels:

- Initial: These people think that the world revolves around them. Needless to say, they are most immature. You cannot trust them, you cannot believe what they say, and in short, they are best avoided.
- Repeatable: These are people you can trust. But they come in with fixed personalities that don't ever change, not for the better, and thankfully, not for the worse under normal circumstances. But put them under stress, and they revert to the first level faster than a snake's strike.
- Defined: These people are those you can trust, and in addition, they have some goals, some principles and values in life. They listen to others, get feedback, but may not necessarily incorporate feedback that they don't like.
- Managed: These people believe in measurement. Along with all the good qualities of level 3, these people measure their lives, keep tabs on how they are progressing, and generally are extremely likeable people.
- Optimizing: These guys follow all processes of level 4, and in addition, strive for continuous improvement.

So, which level is your personality in?

Postscript: No, I am not serious. I agree that the human personality is too diverse to fit nicely into a set of five buckets. Still, considering the pace at which the CMM craze is picking up, particularly in Indian software service companies, I just _had_ to pen this.

What marriage does to normally sane people

2007-04-03T22:54:00.000+05:30

Nearly all my friends are married, and most of them went over to the dark side only in the last two-three years. So, for some time now, I've been trying to find out what marriage does to normally sane people (read guys), and how it changes them.

Results show that a tiny minority remains unmoved, while most people change substantially, and a small minority undergoes a complete metamorphosis.

However, one change common to all married friends of mine is what I call the "good-host-syndrome". Nearly all of my married (male) friends are affected by it. Suddenly, the guy who would slap you on your back, throw a few Kannada curses at you and push you down on a worn out couch, now welcomes you into his home most politely, apologizes for the plush setting, and asks his wife to cook goodies for you. Oh, and the wives aren't far behind. They enquire many times if you've had enough to eat, if the salt was right, and they are insitent in apologizing for the wonderful cuisine they've prepared for you. Seriously, this gets embarassing, particularly for someone who fills his plate with cold dinner (Thank God my mom doesn't read my blog!) at midnight. And, it does not end here. God forbid if you go out for dinner/ movie/ trek/ bowling/ museum/ lunch/play/any other activity, the friend has to pay, even for you!

I'm not saying that my friends weren't hospitable before marriage - I mean, come on, what else can you expect from Bangaloreans, but their change has been nothing but radical. Earlier, the hospitality was a heart-to-heart connection. Now, it is a heart-to-heart connection, but with overflow!

A futher subvertive effect of marriage has also been noticed on single people. Single men who have come in close contact with married couples have taken on some of the hosptiable attributes, and they behave in the same way!

I was in the US recently, on work, and I had a great time outside of work as well. The reason is simple - married friends and infected single friends!

Thanks to them all! :)

The cricket debacle

2007-04-01T19:34:00.000+05:30

I didn't want to write about this. Really, believe me, I'm totally tired of watching, listening to and reading the same analysis over and over again. Come on, it is not like we had a national disaster! OK, the team lost. Get over it. And it is not even the Indian cricket team! Would you be as disappointed if a Wipro coding team lost in an international software competition? [Substitute an appropriate company if you work for Wipro ;)]

Anyways, in the discussions and articles that analyzed reasons for India's defeat, I didn't see two reasons I think are central to the debate: the lack of a sporting culture in India and the lack of respect for hard-nosed, nose-grinding-on-the-mill-stone work.

I think the first is more basic. As a country and as a culture, we lack sporting instinct, and love for sport. Blame it on the hot weather, blame it on excessive academics, or on over-indulgent parents, but the truth is that we don't really care about sport. We have weird notions of national pride and state pride, which we want to see satiated everywhere, but we don't love the game for what it is. We don't understand the discipline it takes to succeed at sports. We don't go to our children's school games with a video camera, we don't cheer for a school/ college/ city/ state team when it is playing, we don't broadcast school games live on local TV. We don't fight for schools to have good grounds, we don't ask for good coaching at the school/college level, but we all want the national team to dive like Michael Phelps at the start gun. Remember though, when I say we, I don't mean just us - I'm including the establishment, the government, everyone. Let's face it - as long as we don't care about sport, barring the occasional world cup win or test series victory, we'll only draw blanks. As the saying goes, if we have one finger pointing at Dravid and co., we'll have four pointing at the rest of us.

Next, I must highlight the lack of respect for hard-nosed work. As the saying goes, "Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration". Bhimsen Joshi apparently stood in waist-deep water, practising his singing for over four hours everyday to become one of the doyens of music. Sachin is said to have stood in front of the mirror for hours - not checking his hairstyle as some would accuse him of doing - but perfecting his swing. In Microsoft's TechVista, Prof. C.N.R. Rao had a lot to say about hard work and deferred gratification. But these are not the stories we tell our youngsters. These are not the heroes we celebrate. We love the Dhoni six, as technically flawed as it may be, we love Sehwag's flaying shots outside the off-stump, and have the standard excuse when they get out to rash shots: "Arre yaar, voh dil se khelta hai", as though that is the Ganga jal that purifies all sin. As ever, form over function. (Note: Even as you read this, please please remember that I am NOT saying that Sehwag or Dhoni didn't work hard. I'm only saying that as a public we don't care about the work ethic that goes into anyone's success. )

I've seen parents who came to a cricket camp I attended as a child, shouting at the coach, asking him to give more turns to their son to bat/bowl. I still recall the howls of protest that went up as the coach asked us to run around the field, to stretch, and to run up and down the pitch. All we wanted to do then was swing the bat, and throw the ball. Everything else was secondary. And there was a not-so-implicit hierarchy: batsmen belonged to the Brahmin class, bowlers were the Kshatriyas, the wicket-keeper was the shudra, and the fielders were the untouchables. Imagine the sort of cricketing ethic we would have learnt here. And no, I'm not blaming the coach - it was the parents, the friends, and the onlookers, who were always more happy when the player hit three or four sixes, as opposed to taking a crucial, match-winning catch.

Appreciation for hard work, appreciation for the people doing the grunt work that keeps the machinery running, appreciation for people who put the team before self - these are not attributes we teach our youngsters. Until these change, we may see occasional successes, never repeatable ones.

[Postscript: I know this may upset some of you - if you are going to flame me, please keep in mind that I'm not claiming that these are the only reasons or even the most important reasons for India's defeat. I'm only saying these are reasons that I did not see mentioned.]