Basket Case

Great customer service is about consistency

2012-01-18T11:00:00.000+05:30

Couple of years ago at Pothi.com, we were working on a Hindi poetry book. It was a collection of poetry of the father that the son was publishing. It was a very big deal for the son. He had organized a family gathering and book launch in his home town. We were working on a tight schedule but the books were shipped with time remaining on the clock. The book launch was on Tuesday and the consignment reached the client on Saturday afternoon. Shortly afterwards, I received a call from them.

Getting a call or an email from the clients after they have received the books is not uncommon. There is something about holding your own printed book in your hands that moves people. It is usually a time to celebrate after the long time spent working on the book. However sometimes, things go wrong.

When our clients opened the consignment, shiny new books came out. However on leafing through the pages, they realized that while the cover was of their book, the interior was something entirely different! At 16:00 PM on Saturday, I came to know of this. Family members were coming from all over India for the launch. Our client was to catch his flight in 2 hours. Something needed to be done quickly if we wanted to avoid the disaster.

The courier services usually pick up their last consignment at 21:00 PM. This left us with 5 hours to reprint the books, bind them, trim them and handover to the courier. With some exceptional work from our production people, we somehow managed to put the consignment in before courier cutoff time. To put it in perspective, it usually takes 3-5 days to produce and ship the same order under normal conditions.

However, due to time crunch, we were not able to laminate the covers on this set. Also we were not sure if the direct shipment to the small city would reach in time. So we printed another set of 100 books next day with proper lamination and shipped them to Delhi on Monday to one of the relatives who was driving down to the home town on Tuesday for the book launch. By God's grace, all the copies reached the client in time and they had a memorable book launch.

I sometimes relate this story to friends and they all look reasonably impressed with how we dealt with the situation. Someone suggested that this is an example of great customer service and we should mention it more prominently. However I do not agree.

As humans when we are faced with a crisis situation, we are often able to pull off things that we wouldn't be able to do normally. This is true for both physical as well as mental abilities. Given that we, as entrepreneurs, keep hearing that having a satisfied customer is very important, we often go out of our way to achieve that in a crisis situation. A well known startup in Bangalore offered a client an air ticket in lieu of a bus ticket when the bus didn't show up!

But this has nothing to do with customer service. This is crisis management. The customer service is the part that makes sure that such crisis do not happen in the first place. It means that as a company, you are consistent (hopefully consistently good) in your service delivery and in your communication with customers. The best example of Pothi.com's customer service would be the author who never had to call me up to resolve any issues. Good customer service is a boring story that is repeated with every customer every day with no drama thrown in.

Why is it important to keep this distinction in mind? Because it is easy to confuse your crisis management with your customer service. Let us say you have a standing offer of a full refund in case a defective product is delivered to your client and you actively fulfill it whenever the need arises. Given the situation of most companies in India, you will be doing something quite rare and your customers will be happy. The more the need arises, the more chances you get to make a customer happy and you feel good. Unfortunately, more such cases mean that your primary service delivery is not working up to the mark. While as a customer, I would be happy that you made up to me in a crisis situation, I will quickly move to someone else if they are more consistent in their service delivery.

The other difference is that the promised delivery levels should be set keeping in mind the sustainability. What you can deliver is a crisis situation may not be sustainable on an ongoing basis. If you require maximum 3 days for delivering something, promise 3 days even if you can deliver in 2 80% of the time.

So in summary, while the grand stories of crisis management make for interesting story telling, a good customer service needs to be exactly the opposite - predictable, consistent and sustainable. In other words, a boring story.

For every risk, there exists some reward! Not!

2012-01-07T16:58:00.001+05:30

Some people seem to misunderstand the "high risk, high gain" maxim. They argue that if I am taking some risk, I should get the reward. I recently heard a candidate expecting 100% raise when considering an opening at a startup.

When you hear "high risk, high gain", pay attention to the order. Risk comes before gain. Often much before. And the fact that the (monetary) gain is not guaranteed is part of the risk (in the startup environment).

While you are at it, find out about the concept of expected value. Your aim should be to maximize the expected value of your reward over next N years of your career. Now depending on your definition of reward, that might mean that you are better off in a job with a bigger company which is perfectly rad. But at least, you won't have ridiculous expectations!

PS: Just as I was posting the article, the right idiom occurred to me: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. So there.

Technical Goals for 2011: Mid Year Review

2011-08-11T02:38:00.002+05:30

Although we are already 2 months past the middle of the year, I decided to do a "mid year" review of my technical goals for this year to see how am I doing. Here we go:

HAML, SAAS & Coffeescript: No progress :(
SproutCore & BackBone.js: After a cursory look, I decided to explore Backbone.js for our upcoming project at Pothi.com. Still getting a feel of it.
Learn Haskell: Deferred
Git: Since Drupal moved to Git, it is hard to ignore it and I am beginning to get familiar with it. But given that we use trac, I don't think we will be leaving SVN anytime soon.
Android: No progress
SQL: Finally starting to dig into this. Not a very planned effort but in 6 months managed to understand few more nut and bolts of Mysql. Ran a few Explains finally :). Learnt to generate slow queries log and also managed to fix some obnoxious queries sitting in Ubercart.
Beautiful Code: I realized that "finishing" beautiful code is not the right way to approach it. I read it one chapter at a time whenever I feel like and also re-read the earlier chapters to better understand what are they saying. Meanwhile instead of "Founders At Work", I have acquired "Hackers & Painters" and will be reading that.

This doesn't look impressive at all. But there are 2 new set of tools that were not in my initial plans that I have come to know and use. One are Job Queues/ Message Queues. Used Celery for building a system for crunching the Streaming API of Twitter. Planning to also check out BeanStalkd and other Job Queues.

The other set is deployment & configuration management Tools like Cap, Fabric, Puppet and Chef. Puppet and Chef were not immediately useful for the task at hand but Fabric and Cap were. I decided to stick with Fabric since it is more generic in nature and it is Python. I am consciously trying to not get into one more language. Want to spend some time to get better with Python.

A related discovery was Vagrant which is a tool for provisioning Virtual Machines using Oracle VirtualBox. Using a combo of VirtualBox and Fabric, I am setting up a "few clicks" server for building and deploying for Pothi.com. Will also use it for all other projects once the basic code base is more stable.

The surprising thing is that looking back at my initial list, I now feel that it was all over the place with no core theme tying everything together. If I somehow manage to get to all of them by the year end, I would have gained familiarity with some good tools but I doubt I would be any good in using them. The tools need to be something that I can get down to do real work with. Also they should be something that improve my work. The things I ended up playing with fit that pattern. They fix some basic loopholes in my tool chain. So keeping that in mind, here is the new list:

CoffeeScript & Sass
BackBone.js
Celery/ MessageQueue
Fabric/Vagrant

On a related note, I submitted a talk proposal to Pycon India, 2011 and it has been accepted. The talk is about various ways of implementing Naive Bayes Classifier in Python and comparing their performance and pros & cons. So I will probably be in Pune for 2-3 days in September. This is going to be my first technical talk since grad school. Need to finish the work I want to cover in the talk and then start working on the presentation.

And while I have been busy with this stuff, Jaya has been killing it with Python. She has been super productive since she started using Python couple of months back and has already automated a significant part of our backend operations, thus opening up a lot of bandwidth. If there was any more proof I needed that Python is the one general purpose language everyone should pick up, I now have it! :)

The saga of plain text password

2011-05-10T01:11:00.001+05:30

Recently, one of the major Indian payment gateways, CCAvenue was reported to have been hacked. Medianama has good coverage of it including an interview with the very bureaucratic sounding CEO of the company.

While a payment gateway getting hacked is a big news, the bigger revelation were the clear text passwords that came out of the compromised database. There have been a lot of comments and discussions about this all over the startup blogs. Reading through those comments it appeared to me that there is a lot of confusion regarding passwords and how to securely store and transmit them. Saurabh Nanda has a good little primer about things to read. This is my attempt to clarify some of the things involved.

First a few basics. Any situation that involves passwords has 2 parties. The aim is to establish identity between parties. For simplicity, we will assume that it is the user that wants to establish his identity with the service. Login/Password system works on the basis of a shared secret. You tell the service the correct shared secret and it identifies you. One important thing to remember here is that the secret is being established between the user and the service only and not between the user and the employees of the company providing the service. For example, we would not want a database admin in Google to be able to read all our mails.

On to the specific questions.

Is it ever OK to store password in plain text?

There are 2 scenarios of an application dealing with passwords. One is of a web app like Gmail that allows people to sign up and hence must keep track of login passwords. The other is of intermediate apps like browsers that store users credentials for various services to make it more convenient for users. The answer for the first kind of applications is "never". The answer for the second kind of applications is "if done properly".

Basically, the applications in second category need access to the original password when logging in the user to service provider. So they cannot hash the password and store that. They can certainly encrypt it but that may or may not be any more secure then a plain text password stored properly. Even here, adoption of OAuth is reducing the need to deal with user passwords directly.

What is the difference between Encryption and Hashing?

Encrypted things can be decrypted if the key is available. So it only pushes back the question of security one layer deep. How do you ensure the security of the key? You can encrypt that also but then you need to safeguard the key-key. You get the drift.

Hashing is a one way road. A good hashing function has 2 properties: hash value of 2 different inputs is different. And given the hash value, it is extremely difficult (computationally) to retrieve the input string. Because of the first property, we can safely store the hash value in place of the original password. Whenever we need to match, we can just compute the hash and match it to the stored value. Because of the second property, even if someone gets access to the hash values, they cannot recover the password easily.

Are all hashing functions created equal?

No. In the past decade, the commonly used hash functions like MD5 and SHA-1 have been successfully attacked. So the current recommendation is to use SHA-256, SHA-512. However the suggested best choice for password hashing is bcrypt. The advantage of bcrypt is that you can tune it to be as slow as required. How does that help? Well, it increases the resources required to mount a brute force attack significantly. Normal hash functions are built to be very fast. As a result, attacker can compute hashes of millions of passwords per second. With bcrypt, that number goes down several notches and makes the approach unfeasible.

Why is is OK to receive a one time password in plain text?

Since the service should never store the original password in plain text, if the user forgets the password, the only way out is for him to choose a new password. To allow that the service needs a way to establish his identity. This can be done with the help of security questions. A more popular way is to send a mail to the registered email address of the user.

Now if the reset password email contains your original password in plain text, that is a huge red flag. This means that the site stored your original password. Remember that it is not possible to recover original password from the hash.

But it is ok if the mail contains a one time password in plain text. This password is not meant to be stored and used more than once. So even if someone gets access to it, there is no issue. If on the other hand, if someone intercepts your mail and gets access to it before you do, even a hashed/encrypted password will not make much of a difference. The way to prevent the snooping is to use https for your mail and other sensitive connections.

Perhaps this is nothing new for most people but given that even Reddit guys were found storing plain text passwords, it is always good to double check on your security practices.

आर्तनाद

2011-03-28T23:43:00.000+05:30

हार कर उठने की क्षमता अब नहीं मुझ में रही,
वो ह्रदय की मधुर ममता अब नहीं मुझमे रही.
अब तो मैं संसार के वारों से होकर छिन्न-भिन्न,
बन गया हूँ रूद्र हिंसक आर्तनादी नरपशु.
अब मेरी सब इन्द्रियां रक्षा में मेरी व्यस्त हैं.

मधुर गुंजन मधुप का गांडीव की टंकार है
दामिनी का दमकना अब युद्ध की ललकार है,
दीख पड़ते हैं मुझे चहुँ ओर अपने शत्रु दल,
सांस की आवाज़ मानो शून्य में चित्कार है.
मान था अभिमन्यु सा, अब द्रोण सुत सी वेदना!

The Saga of Static IP

2011-03-17T01:51:00.000+05:30

Recently we decided to get a static IP for our office broadband connection. We are a long time Airtel customer and usually not very annoyed with their service. They are quick to respond to complaints and things mostly work as they should.

We placed a request for a static IP and were told that it would require a 1 hour downtime to set up. 1 hour is no big deal and so we asked them to go ahead. Our connection went out at around 5pm on Thursday evening. Someone was coming to set up the router for static IP.

The person arrived at 9pm and started configuring the router confidently. We were hoping it to be a fairly quick and smooth process but suddenly the disaster struck! The 4-5 steps which he had been taught didn't get the link up. After that it was one hour of him calling various people, trying out some really weird configurations and generally hitting refresh. After struggling with it for 1 hour, he told us that our router did not "support" the static IP. He promised to come back next day morning with another router. However he would not be able to come before 11-12pm. So much for a 1 hour downtime!

Next day morning, we were running the office on our mobile 3G connections and a Reliance Net Connect stick and waiting for him to turn up. When I called him up at 11, he said that he had a meeting in the morning and won't be able to come. He was sending someone else. This other person came around lunch time, managed to get the Internet running but the router he brought was not a wireless router. We had a wireless router earlier and half of our machines run on wireless. We didn't have enough cables to connect all the machines. He again promised to come back with a wireless router soon. I had a hunch that I am making a mistake believing him but had no option. Our office had wires all around now with half of the machines off the network.

When we called him next day, pet came the reply that the wireless router is out of stock. They had no idea when it would be back in stock and when could they give us one. Remember that we have actually paid extra to Airtel to get a wireless router. We lodged another complaint with the customer service. They promised to resolve it by the evening but it was clear from their tone that they really don't consider this a serious problem. As a result of the complaint we again got couple of calls from local guys and they repeated the excuse that the wireless router is not in stock. Now I would have readily believed them if there was even an iota of sincerity in their voice. But it seemed like I was needlessly harassing them for wireless when I should have been thankful that at least my Internet was working!

After realizing that we were not going to get anything useful by breaking our heads with them, we decided to give the wireless router which supposedly didn't "support" static IP, a chance. With some googling and common sense, we had our static IP and wireless running in half an hour! So much pain and frustration for something which should not have been a problem in the first place if only Airtel would have taken time to train their field staff well.

Consider the situation. Airtel probably uses a handful of router models - 5 or may be 10. The 2-3 most basic things to do with a router are setting it up for dynamic address, for static address and setting up the wireless. How difficult is it to equip all their field staff with printed instruction sheets for these basic 3 tasks for these 5-10 models? When taking the request for the static IP, they had asked us the model number of router, so they already had that information. The only thing that the guy needed to do in our case was to delete the old config on the router and create a new one from scratch instead of trying to modify the old one. How difficult is it to mention this one fact in the instruction sheet for our model number? It would have saved them multiple phone calls to support center, multiple field trips and an annoyed customer.

But instead of investing in things like this, they recently invested 100s of crores in changing the logo and brand identity. Somehow they fail to understand that a shiny logo and funky tune cannot make up for such bad service experiences. I can only shake my head in disbelief and frustration!

From Low Priced Editions to Fair Priced Editions

2011-03-12T03:14:00.000+05:30

A major group of Indian publishers is up in arms against a proposed amendment to the copyright act of India. Put simply, the said amendment allows for the export of any edition of a title into India even if specific Indian editions are already available.

There are some genuine points both for and against the issue. However the debate has long since devolved into fear mongering and finger pointing. One of the interesting claim of the publishers is that the said amendment will also legalize the export of Low Prized Editions of text books and technical books back to USA and UK. As a result, publishers in those market are likely to stop giving licenses for LPEs.

I personally think that it is very far fetched. There is enough protection against such imports in USA/UK markets. Some short sighted foreign publishers might pull out but then that should not be the guiding factor of our policies anyway. However the reaction from publishers set me thinking in another direction.

Given its status as the outsourcing hub, a very young population and growing number of people comfortable with reading in English, India is a big market for Technical Books and Text Books. Why is it then that Indian publishers are happy to be the printers of LPEs rather then develop their own titles in this market? It is estimated that 70% of Indian book market is of Text Books. This includes everything from Primary to Higher Education. Most of the text book publishers of India seem to be focused on school segment. The titles that do come out in the Higher Education Segment are not up to the mark - bad quality of writing & bad production value. And I am yet to come across a solid technical book (IT and CS are the areas I can vouch for) by Indian authors, published by an Indian publisher. Most of the known names O'Reilly/Shroff, Pearson, Prentice Hall basically bring out LPEs of titles originally written and produced outside.

With the growing number of good techies in India, there should be no dearth of possible authors in India for technical subjects. Recently one of the startup founders wrote a book on SaaS. There is also an increasing number of open source contributors in India. However, due to the fast changing nature of technology, the technical publishing is also a very quick moving market. To survive it today requires adoption of technology, quick adaptability to market and out of the box thinking. The competition is intense, especially from the increasingly high quality free content available online. Indian authors will typically need more hand-holding as compared to their foreign counterparts. But the size of the opportunity seems to be large enough to be worth the risk.

We can either let someone else do all the hard work and be happy publishing LPEs or we can go out and carve out a piece for ourselves. Then we can throw away this tag of LPE and have our own Fair Priced Editions. Given the amount of changes happening in the publishing industry currently, I believe that there is a window of opportunity here. I just hope that there are people in Indian publishing industry who see the possible threat to LPEs as an opportunity!

Finding Geeks!

2011-02-03T00:16:00.000+05:30

That the education system in India is screwed up is no secret. When companies like Infosys, TCS and Wipro say that a large number of engineers graduating every year are unemployable, it sets a pretty low bar on the quality of technical education.

The low standards of technical education are felt most acutely by the entrepreneurs trying to build technology companies in India. On one hand, very few good engineers survive the education system. On the other, the few who survive are claimed by the companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and other well established firms.

Now it would be excellent to tackle this problem head on and fix the education system in a fundamental way. However I have been thinking about a much smaller problem recently. As a matter of immediate relief to the high technology startups, is it possible to help more geeks/hackers to survive the current system? What is the most effective way of doing that? Out of that huge swamp of mediocrity, how can we give a helping hand to those who want to excel?

An immediate question arises: why do I even think that something like this can be done? My inspiration, ironically, comes from some of the recent laments about the state of CS education in India and the fact that we have hordes and hordes of students signed up for these courses who do not have any passion or inclination for CS. However, in the true spirit of optimism, I invite you to see this glass as half full instead of half empty.

I spent about 2 years in a grad school in USA. One of the important concerns of the universities there was that fewer and fewer students were opting for computer science in high schools. As a result, the pool from which the top under graduate programs used to get their students was shrinking. One of the reasons was that CS was not thought of as a cool subject anymore. It was associated with the geeks and nerds and with having to sit in a cubicle all day staring into a monitor. Many outreach programs were being run by the universities to reach out to high school students and convey the excitement of CS and show them the cool things they could do with it.

In India, we have exactly the opposite situation. We don't need any outreach programs to convince people to come and try computer science. The number of people attempting JEE is now up to 500,000 from 120,000 about a decade back. Every years thousands of students enroll in the CS programs and lacs in engineerings programs, all across the country. Yes, many of them do it because of the herd mentality. Most of them have no passion for it. But at the end of day, we do get a big pool of people who have signed up for a technical education. Question to ask is, how can we leverage this situation?

Let me first say something about passion. When I joined IIT in 1999, I had almost never touched a computer. I used to find it difficult to control the mouse to click on a link. I had never written a program. I had no idea what computer science was. I opted for it only because people around similar ranks used to do that. 2.5 years later, I qualified for the ACM ICPC World finals. That is because once I took to computers, I loved them. Fortunately, I was in an environment that provided ample opportunities to develop my interests and an awesome set of peers to interact with. ICPC played a major role in motivating me to become better at coding & algorithms. The take away is that passion can arise after having experienced something. If we insisted that only those interested in CS choose CS, in Indian context we would be doing ourselves a big disservice.

Coming back to the big pool of students, one of the ways to hack this problem is building what I will refer to as geek magnets. What is a geek magnet? It is an activity/group which attracts geeks or possible geeks with a lot more force then non-geeks. Two examples are ACM-ICPC & Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Another example is Y Combinator (YC). IITs are NOT an example. Being completely optional is a primary criteria. In fact, an ordinary person should not see any value of participating in it and even if he does, it should be offset by requirement of huge effort on his/her part.

Even inside IIT, participation in ICPC was the single biggest predictor of hackers from non-hackers (in cs). It also attracted students from all over India who were excellent geek material. While some of them come from well known colleges, a lot of them came from not so famous places. Unfortunately, there was no community effort around ICPC and so there is no strong legacy.

GSoC was not around when I was in college otherwise I am pretty sure I would have signed up. Fortunately the program also has a strong community component which helps participants connect even after the actual program is over. The program manages to attract students from every corner of India. Best thing is that once someone from one college has participated, you will find regular participation from that college in coming years.

I believe that creating more such "Geek Magnets" and sending them out fishing in the big pool is one way of finding and nurturing the hackers/geeks hidden in the vast pool of students we currently have. We need ways of pulling out all these minds and give them spaces to connect with each other and with other geeks. It is the peer interaction that they are lacking in their present situation. We need to provide ways for them to try out and experience geeky activities. Fortunately with the wide availability of internet, creating and sustaining such initiatives is possible now.

Here is a more specific example. Many academic conferences in CS run competitions to gauge the state of the art in a chosen focus area. For example, Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation runs a competition to build MT systems every year. Participants are usually the research groups working in the domain. How about a similar but limited scope competition targeted specifically towards Indian students? It will allow them to go beyond their curriculum and experience building a real life system. The submissions can be open sourced and made available for future participants to come and see. Finding a small amount of money to fund the prices should not be a big deal especially when so many companies want to find and recruit these guys.

So to summarize, in my opinion and in Charles Dickens's paraphrased words, "It is the best of times, it is the worst of times..". While having a large unmotivated student crowd in a bad education system is a huge problem, it is also a very fertile ground for designing, executing and testing strategies to identify and nurture future geeks. As entrepreneurs and hackers, it does not suit us to sit on the fence and wait for the govt to build a better education system or for society to change its attitude. The wide internet penetration among the student population provides us with enough leverage to build parallel systems to find those of our kind and help them survive the education system.

So are you up for a little hacking of the education system?

The Technical Resolutions for 2011

2011-01-01T00:47:00.000+05:30

When running you own company, every year is full of new challenges and learnings. And so was the 2010. However looking back, I am feeling that I didn't gain so much on the technical side.

Recap

The two major things that happened on Pothi.com this year were e-books and the launch of online distribution. Our e-book platform is in the first iteration and still very primitive. We have identified many issues by now which will get fixed in the installment. Online Distribution required a lot of overhaul to the basic pricing mechanism which meant bunch of new Drupal modules. And as the year ends, I am just about wrapping up the new sales dashboard which was long overdue!

We also worked on couple of interesting projects over the summers with 2 interns both of which were in Python/Django. One of them made further improvements to blog2book platform. It is a shame that it has not been pushed to production yet. Primarily due to the memory troubles we are having on VPS and which I have been unable to resolve with Apache. The other project was also close to my heart but has been deprioritized for the moment. We cannot stretch ourselves too thin. Right? :)

The third set of technical work came from the consulting gig where I am working on some NLP/ML stuff. For the first time, I worked with Lucene and returned to Java after a gap of few years. Lucene is a nice technology and replacing the Google CSE based search on Pothi.com is high on my agenda for the next year. Also did some work on Anaphora resolution which I hope will bear fruits in 2011!

So apart from Lucene, I mostly struck to the well known grounds of Drupal and Django. Not to say that there are no technical challenges in those two but a geek always needs new toys to play with :). So for the next year, I have made a list of technical stuff I want to explore:

HAML, SAAS & CoffeeScript
Basically HAML, SAAS and Coffeescript are better ways of writing HTML, CSS and JS respectively. I have the basic idea about the first 2 but never used them in my projects. This year I will try them out in some live project.

Explore SproutCore, Backbone.js
Some of the coming projects on Pothi.com will be heavy on client side. I have been eyeing both SproutCore and Backbone.js for some time. Not to get my hands dirty :)

Learn Haskell - write a non-trivial application in it
Since I started learning Python last year, my affection for functional programming has been increasing. In fact, I have started using more and more array_reduce, array_map and array_filter combined with closures in PHP as well. Also returning back to Java has only made me more impatient with the verbose languages. So time to dig into some Haskell, I say!

Explore Git. Release at least one open source project on Github
Yes, shame on me. But I am a SVN user and I like Trac. However Git combined with Github is more then a version control system. It is now a social system and I am already feeling left out. Need to got on it asap.

Explore the android platform. Develop at least one app.
I bought a LG One P500 Android phone couple of weeks back. Already addicted to Angry Birds :). But it looks interesting as a platform. Also constrained resources == more fun programming.

Learn SQL better. Learn MySQL better. Learn all about database optimization.
So I have never run a Explain on any sql query. Part of the blam must go to Drupal where I survived 1.5 years and many modules before writing any database queries. But now that I am doing more DB stuff in Drupal also, this will change.

Finish reading Beautiful Code. Read Founders At Work.
Beautiful Code was one of my rare impulse purchase online. Have read few chapters and enjoying it. If I manage to finish it within 2011, I will buy Founders At Work.

I know it doesn't look very ambitious. Most of this stuff is already old and past the cutting edge. But let's say this is the lowest to which the bar is set. Let us see how high can I go.

On this note, I wish all of you a very happy and productive new year! Hack on!

The Good and Bad of Facebook "Like"

2010-12-27T01:38:00.001+05:30

I have mixed feelings for the Facebook "Like" button.

In the Facebook universe, "like" is the uniform mechanism for interacting with various pieces of content flowing around. You can Like status updates, photos, comments on updates and photos, Pages and even ads! One interaction to rule them all. The reasoning behind it is that it reduces friction and leads to more people clicking on the like button. This is what Facebook would want the users to do. But what does it mean for us? How do you feel about coloring the whole world in the 2 colors of "like" and .. well, "no comments"?

From the perspective of somebody who likes the human languages a lot, it is distressing. One feature of human languages is that they are wonderfully precise. The variety of expressions and words available to describe very similar but distinct actions, feelings, things is not only useful but also charming. And this precision is very selective. Different cultures develop these fine grained vocabularies for different aspects of life. For example, in Indian languages, most of the relatives get a unique term. Mama, chacha, tau, mausi, bua and others while English stops at cousins. Similarly, there are differences in how the spatial references are made depending on the kind of terrain the speakers mostly deal with. These distinctions make the use of the language more efficient. We can convey a lot more in fewer words.

As opposed to that, "like" is totally and utterly devoid of all contexts and subtle differences. When I see the 600 people like Pothi.com, I have no idea if they like the updates we put on the page, they like us because they worked with us or if they are in general appreciative of the idea. "I'm a Fan" is not much better but it at least teases apart those who simply like the idea from those who are actual users. You feel hesitant in clicking "I'm a Fan" for a good reason - you may not be a fan. You may only approve of the idea. But instead of getting a drop down with 2 options - "I'm a Fan", "I like the idea" - we go to only "Like". Isn't it ironical that we want more people to express more by making the very act of expressing yourself, dumb?

However I also like "Like" for a very different reason. Especially it's presence on the status updates and comments section. These days, many of us perpetually live in multiple long distance relationships - with our siblings, our parents, other relatives, our friends, batchmates, schoolmates. In another time, many of the relationships will simply wither away as geographical distances increased - Away from eyes, Away from heart was the saying. Now instead of those, we have these zombie like relationships which are given a shot of life one status update a time. Thanks to Facebook, the random trivia of our lives are being put to some use at least.

In a face to face relationship, there are a lot of things which cannot be replicated in the online medium. The approval you can read in your sister's eyes, the pat from you friend on the back, a little nod of the head - the unsaid things which matter so much. In the online medium, some of them convert into comments but most of the time, a comment is just too wordy. You just want to nod. Or wave. Or pat the person on his/her back. That is when I love the "like". It substitutes for all those social cues. When my friends "like" my moody status update from late night, it feels good. It feels like a hug and a pat on the back. And it is sufficiently understated unlike the obnoxious "hugs" and "kisses" you can send using third party apps.

Of course, it is unlikely that we will ever move to more sophisticated expression on the social networks. The only way is downwards from here. That is why I think it is important more then ever to heed PG's advice and write once in a while.

Update: Just as I published this post, Blogger prompted me to enable "Reactions" for the posts. What is "Reactions"? Well a "like" where you can define multiple options like "Agree", "Love It", "Hate It" and users can select anyone with a click. Now that was a wish fulfilled very quickly. I am beginning to "like" this Santa fellow! :)

New Year Resolutions That Last

2010-12-20T22:56:00.002+05:30

In another 10 days, 2010 will be past. A past, we can never visit again. But we are humans, a inherently optimistic lot. We don't worry about past, we look forward to future. Well atleast sometimes :)

One of the most popular and perhaps the most way of looking forward to coming year is to take resolutions. While they hardly last for more than few weeks in most cases, everyone keeps taking them every year. Which is fine - they make you exercise for at least for those few weeks. Anything is better than nothing!

Now one way to make your resolutions last longer would be give them some momentum before hand. Why not start working on that reading list right away? Or start getting up a little early everyday starting today. By the time new year rolls in, you would already have started the journey, perhaps even stopped and started again. That should prove to be more effective then suddenly getting up on 1st of January and telling yourself that you are a changed person now.

Try it. I am trying. Been trying to squeeze in about half an hour of exercise in the morning schedule. Also trying out a new working schedule - some exciting things already planned for the first quarter of next year.

And while I was busy doing all this, 29 turned me.

You cannot borrow trust

2010-11-24T01:43:00.000+05:30

If you ever find yourself saying, "If you don't believe me, you can ask <insert a trusted party>", stop. It is already too late. You cannot make up for the lack of trust by borrowing it from someone.
On the other hand, you can borrow money in a time of crunch. So when faced with a choice between keeping somebody's trust or saving some money, choice should be obvious.

How to get Google to fund your startup right after college!

2010-11-12T03:00:00.002+05:30

If you are a hacker and a student in India and you are interested in doing a startup, you have a golden opportunity in your hands.

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program offers $5000 for a 4 month project you do for one of the participating open source projects. You get a mentor, hands on experience of implementing something which will potentially be used by real users and also get to be a part of an ever growing community of hackers in India.

Now let us say, you were able to get into the program. So you have access to:

Money

At today's conversion rate, $5000 translates to Rs.2,22,000/- approximately. After paying taxes (which comes at max to about Rs.6500/- assuming male and no other income), you are left with 2,15,000 in your hands. For a college student, 4 months expenses can be as low as Rs.10,000 when living on campus. But let us keep it at Rs.25,000/- assuming you really decided to live it up. Still there are ~Rs.1,90,000 in your account.

Excellent Pool of Co-founders

If you are on any of the mailing lists like OCC, HeadStart or follow the forums like Pluggd.in, NASSCOM Emerge, you can find any number of would-be-entrepreneurs looking for co-founders, especially technical co-founders. Through the GSoC community, you know a fine set of technical geeks who are willing to spend their summers working on arcane parts of free software projects. Guess what! These are the guys everyone is looking for but is unable to find. Grab one of them and find something of mutual interest. Bonus: your seed fund just doubled. If you want to be extra secure, just find one more co-founder. :)

Experience of actually building something

Assuming you participated in GSoC out of love of hacking and not for money, you already have more experience at building real things than most of the graduating students and most of the alumni of past 2-3 years.

Initiative & Timing

There will not be a better time. Do GSoC in the final year of your college and then use the money to work on your dream startup immediately afterward. You will be in the flow and free of other burdens and worries. If it doesn't work out after 1 year, just think that you took 1 year extra to complete your degree ;-). With the skill set you develop, you will find a good job any given day.

So don't let this golden opportunity pass you by. If only GSoC had existed while I was in college!

Python - A good introductory programming language?

2010-11-08T01:52:00.004+05:30

First a little experiment. The other day, I needed to count words in a string. One straightforward method for this is to break the string into tokens and count them:

def count_words_split(sen):
    return len(sen.split())

This is nice since split automatically takes care of multiple consecutive spaces if present. However in my case all the words were guaranteed to be separated by 1 space only. So following should get the job done with a little less work:

def count_words_count(sen):
    return sen.count(' ') + 1

This is essentially a single pass over the string with no need to create an intermediate list of strings and so should run faster. Surprisingly, on Python 2.5, the first method is twice as fast as the second one. I have no idea why. However sanity is restored on Python 2.6 and the second version is not only faster but also gets better with increasing size of input.

This got me thinking about a good introductory programming language. I learned programming with C and algorithms with Java. Many people have argued that Python makes a better introductory programming language. I have also liked Python in the one year I have been using it. One nice feature of CPython, the primary Python implementation, is that the critical parts of your program where you have need-for-speed can be written as C extensions thus getting a significant performance benefit. Many standard Python modules are written as C extensions.

To a newcomer, however, it is not always clear what is implemented in C and what is not. Most of the time it is OK for somebody who is only learning to program. However an important part of learning to program is to learn about various data structures and the algorithms and how they compare on problems. Now if it so happens that an algorithms that should run faster in theory ends up slower because it uses parts of language implemented in pure Python while the other algorithm silently makes use of parts ported to C and runs faster, it can be confusing. This was the situation I found myself in while running my 2 algorithms on Python 2.5.

In fact, even beyond python, I would argue that a good introductory programming language should be consistent in the results it generates even if they are not the fastest. Perhaps Jython is a better bet in that sense since it will make sure that there are no optimized C modules skewing the timing results. Perhaps it is possible to create a dumb-down version of CPython which will not use modules written in C, using pure Python replacements instead.

PS: In fact, given that algorithms often have a space-time trade-off, even GC might play spoilsport. So does that mean going back to C? :)

Why I am not excited about the new Rupee Symbol!

2010-07-18T01:06:00.003+05:30

While the media initially went all gaga over the new Rupee symbol which somehow seems to have pushed us into an "elite" club, the reports have started coming in that it will be a while before the symbol gets into regular usage.

Anyone with interest in Indian language computing is well aware of the fractured state of the Unicode usage. Most of the media houses still use a proprietary font for their content. Even govt uses many incompatible fonts in the data created by it. Result is a typical " जल बिच मछली प्यासी" situation. Even though large amounts of text is available in digital format, it is useless for a lot of purposes. A lot of people cannot view it properly without installing tons of fonts, it cannot be searched or indexed and it is useless for most computing purposes. Lack of huge amount of digital text is one major problem hampering research in NLP for Indian languages.

With the introduction of Rupee symbol, the situation can become even worse. First it needs to be approved and incorporated in the Unicode standard which itself might take up to 2 years. Then we will need Unicode fonts that include this glyph. Since ISCII is controlled by the Indian govt, it will be able to incorporate it much faster and non-unicode fonts will continue to be used in govt works. This will further delay the adoption of Unicode.

In the view of the above, the whole exercise of giving a symbol to Rupee, is not a mere symbolic exercise which we can just ignore if we don't care about it. It has all the potential to make the state of Indian Language Computing worse then it is today.

Inaugural issue of Pothiz is here!

2010-07-09T01:48:00.000+05:30

Inaugural issue of Pothiz - a new free online magazine is now available on Pothi.com! Jaya is the force behind this one.
I am also trying to write a story for the next issue - a sci-fi epic :-D. Entries are due by 16th July. Let's see how far you can continue to write code and story without mixing them up too much!

How to setup Facebook vanity URL for fan pages

2010-07-06T23:57:00.000+05:30

What is a Facebook Vanity URL?
Facebook vanity url is a url like http://www.facebook.com/pothidotcom which is shorter and easier to remember as compared to the default
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pothicom/18749584929?ref=mf

How can you set it up for your page?
It took me a bit of searching to find this but you just need to visit http://www.facebook.com/username and you can setup vanity urls for all your pages.

Fixing Logrotate on Ubuntu Jaunty Server Edition

2010-07-06T02:04:00.000+05:30

After about one year of having used the VPS based on Ubuntu Jaunty, recently I had the need to go look at my Apache logs. Now Apache log on my desktop machine are always nicely rotated by logrotate without me having to do anything. However on the server, I found a gigantic 1.2 GB other_vhosts_access.log staring at me with no rotation whatsoever in last 1 year.

So I began to learn about logrotate. Running logrotate by hand produced the following which was obviously not true.

abhaya@www$ sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf
rotating pattern: /var/log/apache2/*.log  weekly (52 rotations)
empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /var/log/apache2/access.log
log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/error.log
log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
log does not need rotating

The contents of the status file (/var/lib/logrotate/status) which logrotate uses to determine which log files need rotating was surprisingly empty:

abhaya@www$ cat /var/lib/logrotate/status 
logrotate state -- version 2

So for some reason, logrotate was not able to write to the status file and so no logs were being rotated. Following the advice in this thread, I deleted the status file and ran the logrotate again as following:

abhaya@www$ sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf
And again got the same result as before. Surprised, I tried the command exactly as suggested in the thread:

abhaya@www$ sudo logrotate -v /etc/logrotate.conf
And voila:

abhaya@www$ cat /var/lib/logrotate/status 
logrotate state -- version 2
"/var/log/btmp" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/wtmp" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/samba/log.nmbd" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/samba/log.smbd" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/mysql/mysql.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/mysql.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/dpkg.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/apt/term.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/apache2/error.log" 2010-7-6
"/var/log/apache2/access.log" 2010-7-6

Just one last problem remained. With this setup, logs would start rotating only next week and I did not want my Apache log files to get any bigger then they already were. So I cheated by manually editing the status file and pushing the date against the apache logs about a week earlier.

"/var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log" 2010-6-28
"/var/log/apache2/error.log" 2010-6-28
"/var/log/apache2/access.log" 2010-6-28

And ran the logrotate by hand once again. The logs duly rotated and hopefully will rotate as expected in the weeks to come.

Recommendations

2010-01-31T23:52:00.002+05:30

Why is it that while as a customer anyone can recommend or not recommend my company to others but as a company/provider, I cannot recommend or not recommend a customer to other companies?

Think about it! A registry of PITA customers who are not only going to waste your time, but also going to blame you for it!

Over 1.5 years of Pothi.com, I have interacted with so many wonderful people both as customers, as people who believe in us and people who have been constructively critical. Without them we may not have even lasted so long - they supported us and told us that we were useful when our output was very raw and crude. They pointed fingers and poked holes which helped us improve. It is for all those nice people that I feel this strong urge to single out the jerks and show them for what they are.

We love our customers and see them as our partners. We plan our activities with them, take their suggestions quite seriously and want to succeed with them. Right now I am trying hard to not let these one off nut cases push us off track!

Needed to get this out of my system. World is just so unfair sometimes.

Entrepreneur or Escapist?

2010-01-08T03:34:00.005+05:30

Recently MVP guys started this meme on Twitter which asks #whyamientrepreneur? I am sure every entrepreneur at one time or the other has asked him/herself this question. Some ask it even before they start, while others ask it when they are considering quitting. Either way the answers which come out are quite eye opening - a wide range of reasons bring people to startups. Somebody wanted to create jobs, somebody just wanted to break free from artificial restrictions imposed by the system. Others wanted to be their own boss. All of these are very inspiring reasons and I am sure they have been given with complete honesty. But here is my question to all of the entrepreneurs - Are you an entrepreneur because you are an escapist?

Before I explain what I mean, let me explain what I do not mean. Those who came to do a startup because they wanted to break out of the system or didn't fit in are not escapist by my definition. Neither are those who wanted to "escape" the corporate culture and belong to a smaller team. All those are good kinds of "escapism".

The bad kind of escapism is the one because of which your customer service sucks. Or because of which you haven't followed up on that lead that opened up couple of weeks ago. Or the one because of which your product is never ready to ship. Since you are your own boss in a startup and there are always more on your plate than you can handle, it is easy to keep picking up things you feel comfortable with, things which look like fun and in summary, things which are easy for you (they may look hard to others). If you are a techie, you can always keep working on the next feature believing/hoping that after this your product will be market ready. The truth is - it is not the product, it is you who is not market ready. Or if you are a salesman, you can keep selling your product while relying on outsourced developers and not understanding one bit what goes into it. Since nobody is going to grab your neck for it, it is easy to just let go of that one bad instance of customer service and not call back, not follow up on it. Nobody likes to talk to angry customers. It is easy to escape when nobody is holding you responsible for it.

Entrepreneurship is not about starting your own company, it is about the attitude with which we approach the world, our daily life. Are we pushing ourselves everyday? Are we stepping out of our comfort zones? What new have we learned in past 1 month? Honest answers to these questions may not give you a successful startup but might make you a better entrepreneur.

Bangalore Book Festival 2009

2009-11-18T18:51:00.003+05:30

For the first time I was on the other side of the table in a book festival and it turned out to be a lot of fun. The feeling when somebody finally, after a lot of deliberation picks up a book and says that he wants to buy it, the whole money exchange ritual which happens after that, seeing people find something to smile about or laugh at in one of the books - all of them make it worth while to sit jobless behind the counter for hours.

So while as an exhibitor I quite enjoyed it, I don't think it was particularly great for a real book lover. There was nothing that you could not find in the few book shops around Church Street, it was choke full of religious stalls and despite the tall claims, almost all major Indian publishers were absent - Rupa, Harper Collins, Random Hous e, Hachette India, Westland, Rajpal being the once who come to mind. I remember seeing Katha stall also but even they were missing this time. So at the end of it all, you end up in the same old stalls - Blossoms, Select Book Shop, Bookworm etc and pickup some volumes at a little extra discount.

And I also ended up doing the same. This year we bought only 7 books - as compared to 27 last year - primary reason being the guilt of all the unread books that are piling up in our house and secondary being the lack of time to explore. The 7 books are:

The Life and Times of Pratapa Mudaliar. Original in Tamil by Mayuram Vedanayakam Pillai. Translated by Meenakshi Tyagarajan. Katha.
Katha Prize Stories Volume 3. (Storied published between 1991-93)
India's Unending Journey by Mark Tully.
An Illustrated History of Transportation by Anthony Ridley
How to Self-Edit by Dianne Bates. Emerald Publishers.
A Practical Key to the Kannada Language by Rev. F. Ziegler. Reprint by Asian Educational Services
Scar Tissue - 8 lives, 8 young women. Edited by Nikhat Grewal. Women Unlimited.

As you can see, my love for history & collections continues. We also almost bought the full set of "Mahasamar" by Narendra Kohli - the awesome retelling of the epic Mahabharata. But the price tag of Rs. 2500/- proved to be too steep. We already have the first 2 books which we found in Reliance Timeout. Hunt is on for the remaining ones!

People tell me that Delhi and Kolkata book fairs are better in the sense they are bigger and you can find almost anything you are looking for. Let's see when I get a chance to go to one of them.

So what was your impression of the Bangalore Book Festival 2009?

Ownership is the key!

2009-06-16T12:01:00.002+05:30

This article about Room To Read in Business Week caught my attention, (through a Google Alert set up on Self Publishing). Specifically the last paragraph which I reproduce here:

While Room to Read's accomplishments so far are quite impressive, John isn't satisfied. Children aren't using the libraries enough. Of the 5.6 million books in the libraries, only 1.3 million have been checked out so far. So Wood's local teams are working with schools to make the library experience more compelling to children. Self-publishing content is another piece of the strategy. The more books the organization can publish in local languages that are sculpted for young readers in those places, the more likely they'll want to read them. Unfortunately, it costs about $12,000 per book for writing, editing, and printing expenses.

While generating more engaging content, content tailored to local culture, environment and in local languages is very important, I think there is one more important cultural aspect, at least in India, which is at play here. And that issue is ownership.

To understand this, we can look at the experience of providing computers, often old ones - imported from west on charity grounds, to schools in rural areas. In a lot of cases, the computers are not used because they are simply locked up by teachers for "safe keeping". Since the children are mostly poor and there is hardly any maintenance budget with the school, they are very hesitant to let children have free access to the devices. In other words, they keep the ownership of the machines to themselves.

In books, the problems of maintenance are not that high but my guess would be that mindset remains the same. The ownership of the library remains with the teachers, or some other person with authority. Combine this with all sorts of biases present in the society, those considered bright, good at studies, favorite of the teachers are more likely to get access to the library. On the other hand, those whose needs are not fulfilled by the traditional education - potentially good sports-persons, children with learning disabilities - considered slow for lack of understanding etc are more likely to stay away or kept out - depending on how aggressive the biases are.

But even leaving aside any bias from the teachers, I understand that most of them don't even realize the biases built into the system, the feeling that something is yours generates a totally different level of engagement. It allows children to use the facilites in most imaginative ways possible. For about a year, I worked with the BRiCS project in Media Labs, IIT Kanpur. This project conducts workshops where they teach children to create toys from simple material and tell stories around them. The aim is the make learning more hands on and visual. One very important principle of the project was that as far as possible, children who make the toys should be able to keep them - the concept of ownership. One can build very cool toys with expensive sets like Lego Mindstorm but ultimately, these will need to be disassembled and given back to the school since every children cannot afford those sets. So we tried to develop cheap alternatives to the same, incorporating general scarp available in the immediate environment. And children just loved their messy, odd looking creations built out of that which they could keep.

So if I were to find a way to encourage children to read more books, participate more with the library, I would try to put in place an ownership culture from the beginning, where children own and manage the library. Of course there are issues of mishandling and torn books and who bears the cost in those cases. That is where we need to innovate - technologically to create stronger, better suited books and financially - figuring out a scheme of collective responsibility.

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of how the Room to Read libraries are setup and managed, may be they are already following the principle of ownership. The point of above is to stress the importance of ownership for any such initiative.

Couple of WTFs to set the ball rolling again!

2009-06-11T00:04:00.002+05:30

Slumdog star Rubina to pen biography!

While I am all for people trying to make use of the popularity of these kids for good cause (the proceeds from the book will go to some charity in.. France!), this is stretching it too much. She is all of 9 years old.

Somebody applied to our company with this cover letter:

I am writing to apply for any job opening is there in your company. ... I believe my education, skills and experiences fit your requirements...

Again, don't get me wrong. I know searching for a job can be quite tough but then you have to keep your game up in the tough times and not write such sloppy letters. If you are applying to "any" job, how does your "education, skills and experiences fit our requirement"?

Regular programming will resume in a while!

The Seagate Contest

2009-03-20T00:21:00.002+05:30

I went to the BlogCamp Bangalore few days back and listened to some of the talks. A nice talk by Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures was the highlight of the day for me.

Another interesting thing was a contest being run by Seagate who were the main sponsors of the event. They have launched FreeAgent External Hard Drives in the capacities of 500GB and 1TB. Now that is a lot of space! Challenge is to come up with a creative use for all this space.

What immediately come to my mind is a book mobile. A book mobile is a van that is Internet enabled and has print-on-demand equipment on board (a b/w printer, a color printer, a binder and a trimmer). The van goes around and prints books for people who want them. The biggest problem for deploying this van into more rural areas in the availability of Internet. But with the huge space available with Seagate FreeAgent drives, we can put all the available books - from Internet Archive, from Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, from Digital Library of India - on this drive. This drive will become a replacement for the Internet on the van and will make available all those books to those who will otherwise not get access to this material easily.

The same van with an additional scanner can be used to drive to all the families, institutions where rare manuscripts are available, old records of value, photographs of the yore and scan them in front of the eyes of owner (with so much storage available on the run, there will be no need to take the material to some central location for which it may be hard to get permission from the owners). All this scanned data can be brought back and merged in to a huge digital archive.

I think using FreeAgent drives like this will make this world a better place :-)!

Two quick tips for image refreshing and download dialogue

2009-01-28T17:48:00.004+05:30

As we are moving to use more and more "AJAX" on pothi.com, I keep learning new things everyday some of which really entertain me :-). So let me put them down here.

How to make sure that an image refreshes from server and not from cache?
Suppose you have an img tag and the file in its src attribute is being updated on the server through a ajax call. Now we have to make sure that when the src file changes, the image on the page is also refreshed. On its own, the browser will simply use the version of the file in the cache. To avoid that, you can simply attach a GET query to the end of the image url. So src="test.png" becomes something like - src="test.png?random=<any randomly generated string>". For the random string you can use the surrent time stamp. Short and sweet :-)
How to show a download dialogue for files that browser usually opens without asking?
Browsers usually have a mapping of MIME types and applications. If they get data of a particular mime type and know how to handle that, they will open it i.e. pdf files. In order to force the browser to show a download dialogue which gives an option of either opening or saving, you have to send a header something like this - 'Content-Disposition: attachment;filename="test.jpeg"' . This can be done in php using the header function. A more detailed article is on apptools - http://apptools.com/phptools/force-download.php

These are small things with quick solutions but can sometimes prove to be the final stumbling blocks. I hope somebody will find it useful.

वादा

2009-01-18T18:25:00.002+05:30

"तुम भी प्रियतम?"

"अब छोड तुम्हे मुझको आगे जाना होगा,
अब नयी मंजिलें रह रह पास बुलाती हैं।
अब तुमसे जोडा नाता बंधन सा लगता,
अब नयी सुबह कुछ नये क्षितिज दिखलाती है।"

"अलविदा प्रिये!"

-------------------------------------------------

"तज कर अतीत को और भविष्य पर दर्ष्टि जमा,
जीवन पथ पर आगे को मैं बढ आया हूं।
हाथों के बंधन पैरों के कांटों बदले,
टूटे वादों की किर्चें संग ले आया हूं।

अब नये स्वप्न मानो आंखों मे चुभते हैं,
अब नयी दिशा, अंजान डगर सहमाती हैं।
अब द्रढ निश्चय से मेरा कोई साथ नही,
ना नयी चुनौती अब उत्साह जगाती है।

किस तरह से अब कोई नया नाता जोडूं?
नाता फ़िर से एक दिन बंधन बन जायेगा।
और तोड के बंधन फ़िर आगे जाना होगा,
क्या यूंही अभागा ये जीवन कट जायेगा?"

Book Retailing in India

2009-01-16T21:04:00.004+05:30

It has been long since e-commerce made its debut in India but it is still to catch on in a major way. The absence of Amazon from Indian market is a major indication that it is not yet considered a lucrative enough market by big players. A lot has been said about it, tons of research papers written, lots of workshops/panels have probably discussed it to death. I have not read any of them and so pardon me if what I am going to say sounds very amateurish.

As somebody who is betting on a business model that has Internet distribution at its core, it is very important for me to understand why e-commerce has not caught on in India and what would it take? There is a first obvious bunch of reasons that comes to mind - lack of broadband penetration, lack of good online payment mechanisms ( which includes lack of widespread credit card use and absolutely pathetic state of Indian payment gateways), lack of good logistic providers ( some are way too costly while others are simply not reliable, you can read the horror stories all over web and then I can tell you some of my own experiences) and simply bad e-commerce websites (as put to me by one of the players in the space, pointing towards an old competitor). We all know and understand these and save for the last one, can hardly do anything about them other than pray.

But this post is about a different aspect. I was in US for 2 years and the overarching theme of retail sector there and economy in general seem to be a destruction of giant brick-n-mortar chains at the cost of more efficient online alternatives. Amazon is of course there, Zappos is there and the whole e-bay thing. The current recession has only amplified the vows of physical stores. In short - large scale organized retailers are incumbents in the new economy that is taking shape.

Turn to India and the picture couldn't be different. The organized retail sector in India is just getting started. The last few years have actually seen the spread of the model from groceries to stationary, shoes, electronics and everything else you can think of. Deep pocket, large players are entering the space one after another in a mad rush. Again the current slowdown has brought down the expansion speed but the trend is not over by any stretch of imagination because the fruits of a more integrated supply chain managements are just beginning to be felt by the common masses.

Let's talk specifically about books. Today we have several large format book store chains around - Landmark, Crossword, Depot, Timeout and others. And the customer experience is just so much better in them as compared to normal book shops - you no longer need to know the name of the book/author you are looking for, you can go and browse the books, read them, discover new authors right there in the book store - none of which is possible in an old format store. The choices available are much wider. The point is - the new format retail is a much bigger deal for books as compared to let's say grocery. Most of the time you don't have to explore and discovers new groceries. But in books - that is the name of the game. There is a value add besides simply the price.

On the other hand, this is also a fact that books are one of the best selling online items in India after ticket bookings (Air and train). In a especially price sensitive market like India, they have a clear advantage (although combined with the expensive shipping, that gets diluted). The large number of languages in India present a totally new challenge for distribution and creates many types of long tails (inherently smaller languages like Tulu, the groups of people living away from the main language area - Tamils in North) which are again ideally suited to digital solutions but none of the current players seem too keen on them. Increasing petrol prices are kind of ambivalent - they probably encourage users to avoid driving to retail stores but they also jack up the logistics costs in form of fuel surcharges.

The question I wonder about is - In this situation where these two models are seeing simultaneous evolution, how will they interact? Will we see a Indian Amazon emerge which will soon start kicking butts of big retail stores? Will the Indian retail chains adapt to Internet better and sooner then their US counterparts have managed (given that Indian companies have already seen how it can turn out)? Will we short-circuit to the future that seems to be taking shape in US or will we reach some different equilibrium point? All these are interesting questions and those making right bets will emerge at the top. But as we know from the Quantum Physics - "The very process of observation affects the results of observation." Similarly these bets are also going to decide what future turns out to be.

Exciting times!

OCC Bangalore

2009-01-16T01:46:00.002+05:30

10:30 AM on Sunday mornings. That is the time when Open Coffee Club Bangalore meets at some pre-selected venue - usually a nice and cozy coffee shop or a newly-opened-looking-for-some-exposure restaurant. It is a great way of finding out good places to have coffee and off beat food. For example, I discovered Tam's in Koramangala through one of the meets.

While for me this is a good enough reason to get up every alternate Sunday mornings and head to OCC meet, you might find the entrepreneurship aspect of OCC more alluring. Essentially OCC comprises of folks who are somehow related to entrepreneurship, startups, ecosystem - those sort of things and cannot afford to drink on Sunday mornings. So they (me included) end up getting together and talk about issues that affect us, opportunities that we can use and generally get to know each other. The diversity of the group is amazing. A sample of people from the most recent meet in ZOE, Indiranagar - A chartered Accountant, A fashion and image makeover consultant, A social entrepreneurship enthusiasts who was visiting form USA where he is doing his MBA, publishing (yours truly), energy (Amarinder Singh - one of the organizers), A recent college grad who sold his laptop, bike, mobile to raise money for his maiden venture, guys from companies like thoughtworks, handicraft, advertising and so on. And since we had a meet on just the last Sunday, many of the regulars actually didn't turn up. So now you have an idea!

The best thing about OCC remains its very informal atmosphere. The thing to realize is that not every one in startup ecosystem is extrovert and good at networking which seems to be a must have quality to enjoy and make use of most of the events organized around startups. You are left in an arena with lots and lots of folks and you are supposed to "network" with them. Doesn't work for me. I much better like the OCC format where everybody gets to say something about themselves and probably have some discussions and in the end you are free to go and talk to anybody. At least you have some idea about the other person before the "networking" starts.

In almost every meet, I have found someone useful to talk to or some other people have found it useful to talk to me (I hope :-)). This time we had some really interesting folks. One of them is working on a service where you can backup the data on your sim card on the servers of the operator. So they plan to sell this technology to the mobile operators, a strategy on which house was divided. Some people thought that operators may just go ahead and copy the idea since technology is cheap in India while others had the experience that once they see the value, operators are usually quite supportive. Another person had the idea of saving energy in sign board display by using sideways glowing optical fiber instead of tube-lights. They have only recently started working on this and fiber is being sourced from China(?).

Some people also came up to me at end and talked about the print-on-demand and books in general. One question that came up was that in the age when the movement is towards e-books and everything digital, it seems a little retrograde to do something which takes you back to print. The answer to this requires a whole post which I will do later. But the short answer is as the e-books become more popular, the need for print-on-demand will go up since long runs from offset printing will become more and more unviable.

All the above is only "the tip of the iceberg" - as they say - and that too only from my point of view which is again distorted by the lag of one week between the meet and writing the post. If you are in Bangalore and interested in startups in any capacity, do drop in. The meets are free but it is good to order something in order to justify the usage of the cafe/restaurant where the meet is happening. A budget of Rs.100 will take you quite far in OCC :-). For latest information, you can follow OCC Bangalore on twitter : OCCBangalore. The next meet is scheduled to be on 18th of January, 2009. Please mark your RSVP here - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1486394

Demopits' experiences at Headstart 09

2009-01-11T01:46:00.003+05:30

I went to see the demo pits of Headstart 2009 at the NIMHANS convention center in Bangalore today. It was nice of the organizers to make these free thus providing good opportunities of interaction to the participating companies and also showing poor entrepreneurs like me that they care ;).

Over to the companies, there were some really nice ones. I found the demo from Artin Dynamic most cute (I know that is probably not a compliment a startup expects but can't help it). Basically how about having a power supply with a USB interface to the CPU. Now when the CPU is off, it basically cuts off the power supply thus eliminating the zombie usage completely. The product is called SPARA. Nice!

Then there were two companies that seem to be doing NLP analysis of the data in order to get structure out of them. One of them was alertpedia which monitors some selected websites in order to match the new additions against structured queries specified by the users. Whenever a match occurs, the user gets a alert. So you can say things like - I want to monitor "Bikes on sale in Bangalore" and it will be treated like a structured query. The second company was Meshlabs and the product was zimesh. The guy at the stall said that they do complete parsing of the data. Some of the data comes from various RSS feeds and also users can add any content into the system. Here the data seems more noisy and I am doubtful how well the algorithms perform and how scalable will they be as the site usage increases. Another thing would be to identify duplicates - something which they might already be doing but I forgot to ask. They were vague about the details on the NLP part and I didn't push too much :-).

Entrip guys were smart to have a Mac which makes everything look that extra good :-). But their site does have some eye candy. The basic premise is that you can plan your travel and then share the experience post travel. They have integration with lots of services like flickr, youtube, blogging platforms but why are they calling in "travel blog" or something like that, I don't know. It sounds very boring from the name. A team of 6 people from Pune is working on it for about a year now and they have launched few days back.

Then there were many more like wisdomtap, jobeehive, iduple, tringme and others. From a startup's point of view, I don't think they would have found many customers there but it is sure to give more visibility to them among the investors, bloggers, press and in the ecosystem in general.

There were also panels and talks for 2 days which I didn't attend. From what I am reading, the keynote of day 2 delivered by Ashish Gupta looks quite interesting. Read about it here - Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures.

Recession kills the small guys first!

2009-01-07T03:40:00.002+05:30

Found this on a forum. In the time of recession the first casualties are the small guys. Although the common sense says that the first casualties should be the big guys - small guys don't have investors on their backs pushing for growth at all costs, they are more flexible and adaptable to situations and so on. But the fact remains that all the systems are build for the advantage of big guns and it is with great difficulty that individuals or small publishers make their way in. So when the crunch time comes, they are the first ones to be thrown off the boat.

So the question arises - how do we build a recession proof distribution channel for the individual authors? Of course Amazon is already one option but how can we go beyond Amazon? And what about a country like India where digital divide is so huge - how can we use all the technology at our disposal and make publishing/books available to those who don't have access to it and miss it the most?

We've seen something devastating to small pubs happen here in Canada in the last month: Chapters / Indigo, the largest chain in the country (includes Coles and others) has removed any time limit that they have to return unsold books to distributors. For distributors who deal with small or independents, this is disastrous, because if Indigo returns a book 10 years from now, the distributor has to try and return the book to the publisher. If they bought the book from a self-publishing author, that's sometimes impossible. This means that many distributors are dropping self-pubs from their rosters altogether to avoid the cost overhead. (One of my authors was dropped a week before Christmas, just before we launched a huge online marketing campaign.) This means that self-publishing authors are now almost eliminated from the "normal" book-selling channel here in Canada, and will be forced to rely on Amazon as their retailer in almost all cases. I help all my authors with things like on-line direct sales, and affiliate programs, but the traditional channels are a major publicity outlet, if not a huge profit outlet. Indigo's policy stinks anyway - who could be helped by that except Indigo themselves? It's creating an elitist book market.

Something to chew on. Ideas are welcome. Execution, more so.

A case of misplaced priorities

2008-12-19T06:48:00.004+05:30

Recently India's first air conditioned bus stand opened up in Bangalore. In a state that is reeling under severe power shortage - street lights are off on many roads in Bangalore, farmers in the state are getting electricity in the night, hence watering the fields in night and getting bitten by snakes in turn - 2 deaths and 6 more cases in past month or so. And in a city with a lovely weather, which is said to have natural air conditioning in place. Sure it has deteriorated in years but still pretty powerful if you ask my running nose and coughing throat. And in such a city and such a state, we proudly build a air conditioned bus stand.

It is wrong on so many counts that it makes me desperate.

5 of Pothi.com titles launching today during Bangalore Book Festival

2008-11-16T09:52:00.002+05:30

Five of our books are being launched today in Bangalore Book Festival. I am very excited and a little nervous too :-). Please come to the launch and show your support. We promise it will be interesting. Here is a Press Release with some more information - Print-on-Demand titles come to Bangalore Book Festival . You can see the titles being launched on Pothi.com .

Time: 4:30pm
Venue: Gayatri Vihar, Palace Grounds,
Near Mekhri Circle, Bangalore

upcoming page

Bangalore Book Festival 2008

2008-11-10T15:30:00.002+05:30

The Bangalore Book Festival is back. It is happening at Palace Gorunds from 14th - 23rd November. There are going to be over 275 stalls by various publishers and booksellers. I am excited about it both as a book lover and also as somebody who now has business interest in publishing and printing. Check out the details about the festival here : Bangalore Book Festical 2008

I visited the 2004 festival and was mightly pleased with the tons and tons of books all around. That was also the start of my professional life and for the first time I had lots of disposable money on my hands. As a result, I returned back home with around 15 books in my hands, some of them still unread 4 years later :-). But the excitment of buying books is always worth it.

Do leave a comment if you plan to go to the festival. What are your expectations? Looking for some rare books? Hoping to discover some new and exciting publishers?

Guy Kawasaki, Books, Fake Steve Jobs and Motorcycles

2008-11-03T12:28:00.002+05:30

The foreword to Guy Kawasaki's new book by the Fake Steve Jobs. Funny ! I don't know if it will make me jump out of the window and head to a book store to buy the book but will sure make me pick it up and turn few pages whenever I see it next. This may have something to do with me being a poor cash-strapped entrepreneur who loves books. But it sure proves the worth of a suitable foreword in marketing a book. Enjoy !

You know what I think about whenever I hear the name Guy Kawasaki? Motorcycles. It's true. It's the first thing I think about when I hear his name, even though I???ve been told again and again that Guy actually has nothing to do with motorcycles. So then I try not to think about motorcycles, but come on, the dude's name is Kawasaki. What else are you going to think about? And don't say Vietnam because that is not cool, people. Not cool at all. Guy was just a friggin kid when all that shit was going down. Anyway, since Guy is not a motorcycle designer, and also no longer a member of the Viet Cong, I try to think about something else, and usually what I think about is the fact that he worked for me at Apple back in the Eighties. To be honest he didn't make much of an impression on me back in those days, and I didn't really remember anything about him, but I asked HR to pull his records and apparently the only notes we have on him are that he had a habit of cutting the line in the cafeteria and that a lot of people did not like him.
Anyway, Guy worked here for about fifteen minutes but he's been dining out on that for the past twenty years, and whatever, more power to him. His big claim to fame was that he created this notion of technology evangelism and he created this huge community of weirdo Apple fanboys who would camp out overnight to get our products and who would attack anyone who dared to criticize Apple. To this day these freako Apple kooks still worship me like a god and never let me have a moment of peace or privacy. They steal license plates from my car. Some even show up outside my house hoping to catch a glimpse of me as I drive through the gate. Basically, they???ve made my life a living hell.
So, um, thanks, Guy Kawasaki. Thanks a friggin million for that. Great job. I mean it. You dick.
So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. I told Guy, ???Dude, look, I don't read books, okay? Books are a technology of the last century. If you want to make your book into a movie, or a podcast, and if you want to download that video or audio content onto a totally sweet iPod or iPhone, then maybe you will have created some modern content that I will consume, although, to be honest, probably not even then because I don't need to hear your frigtarded ideas about startups or marketing or raising money or whatever because I am already the greatest businessperson in the entire history of the planet and I???ve forgotten more about marketing than you???ll ever know. Besides that I???m super, super busy and important, and I???ve got so much money that I could wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills every day for the rest of my life and I???d still have more money than almost everyone on the planet, including you, since the last time I checked you haven't exactly been setting the world on fire as a venture capitalist.???
But I digress.
Anyway, Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone else turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so fine, I let him beg a little bit and then I made him do some humiliating things like stand on one leg for half an hour and jump up and down and make strange noises, and then I said, Okay, okay, enough already, you total freak, I???ll write you something.
So this is it--my official endorsement. Reality Bites is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976. I???m sure I wouldn't have read it, but still it would have been nice if it had been around back then to help out all those other people who wanted to start companies but couldn't figure out some of the more subtle aspects of business, like the fact that you need to charge more money for your products than it costs you to make them. That's a really super important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business, in terms that a child could understand.
And now I???m thinking about motorcycles again. Dammit! Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.
Fake Steve Jobs
July, 2008

Taken from Guy's blog post.

Didn't we put our best boys to work in i-banking?

2008-10-04T18:21:00.002+05:30

Over the years I saw and wondered at the recruitment patterns at I-banks and other top notch financial institution. They took BTechs, MBAs and PhDs, in Mathematics, Computer Science and even Physics. These were some of the best brains around, armed with the best education our society offered. And we hoped we were in secure hands.

Only that the mess we see now tells us we were not. It is one thing to be able to crunch numbers, to be able to understand and beat complex dynamics of markets, to churn profits years after years for your employers. Putting it all in perspective and seeing the big picture is another. When profit is the only marker one gets judged by, soon or later it will stop mattering where it came from. It has happened again and again but alas ! our greed gets better of us every time.

I think, at one level, it all comes back to the familiar question of responsibility of science. Just because something can be done, should it be done? Packaging bad intentions into a intellectually stimulating exercise and putting your best boys on executing it, the fault has to lie with those at the helm. For those who just played along, without worrying about where all this might lead to, here is a exchange between two famous mathematicians/scientists (I fail to recall the names right now) that seems to describe their mental state:

"If I can prove that you would die 10 minutes from now, though that thought will sadden me a little, the joy of being able to prove something like that will outweigh it easily."

And then again, if I am being paid millions to prove that, even better.

The slippery slope of prejudice

2008-09-20T18:04:00.003+05:30

Recently, while talking to couple of my friends about the bomb blasts and the subsequent police investigations, they took the following two positions without any sense of irony:

Police can easily crack these cases, the only thing missing is political will to let them do it. Example was Gujrat police was able to crack the case in few weeks while so many other cases have not been cracked yet in other states.

In the cases of terrorism, you have to accept circumstantial proof and cannot hope to get good solid evidence.

The question that remains is if the speedy cracking of cases related to acceptance of weak evidence? I totally agree that the political will to crack such cases is missing in general but I see no ground for accepting anything less than rock solid evidence. If we are not able to gather that, we are not cracking the case, we are probably finding scapegoats left behind by the actual master minds.

That thing that never fails !

2008-09-02T22:25:00.002+05:30

I return to blog after so many days and unfortunately it is a bad news. Millions of people in states of Bihar and Assam are reeling under massive floods in Kosi and Brahmaputra rivers. The Kosi floods are much more damaging than previous years because due to the breach in Nepal, the river has taken the course it had left 200 years ago and the areas under flood were actually considered flood safe! While the blame game is on, it is quite clear that the embankment was not repaired and was already beyond its expected life.

But none of that matters right now to around 3 million people in Bihar and 1 million in Assam who have lost their everything in the floods. Many of them are still struck in water logged areas and those who have been evacuated are trying to survive in relief camps setup all over the state. The situation is going to be serious for months to come since breach can only be filled after 2 months when the water level of kosi goes down. Right now the hope lies in the only thing that never fails : human compassion, grit and determination , a will to fight against all odds and help the fellow human beings who are in distress.

So please come out of your comfortable shells and ask how can we contribute. Everyone can in this moment of need, through cash, in kind, in person. And don't stop after you have made your contribution but spread the word, mobilize others, go out and talk about it to all your friends and acquaintances. This will be one forwarded mail, nobody would scoff at.

Information is here : http://biharflood.wordpress.com or send a mail to me, to Jaya, to biharflood At yahoo dot com or to any of the guys listed on the above blog. If none of that works, do a google search and you will find tens more avenues and ways. Not knowing how to help is not an option. Please don't choose it.

That thing I talked about that never fails, that is because everyone of us makes sure that it doesn't !

Snapshots from Indian Retail !

2008-07-21T02:41:00.003+05:30

Organized retail is the industry of moment in India. For past few years, it has been the big thing. Every business group/company in India worth his/her salt has put some eggs in this basket. Now with dwindling growth rates and high inflation rates, the picture is not as rosy as it was a year ago but still most people would bet you money that organized retail is here to stay in India. Presented here are some of my experiences in past few weeks with Indian retail.

1. One day in big bazaar, we decide to have a look at sandwich makers. There are few brands on offer with most stock of a brand called Koryo which Future Group is promoting. For comparison, there is one from Usha. The piece is clearly old, its cord already disintegrating. Its only purpose seems to be to give some sense of choice and make Koryo look like a good deal.

2. We walk into Vivek's, an old and prominent electronics retail chain. They seem to have a more balanced collection with Bajaj, Murphy Richards, Philips.. Philips ! wow ! Looks interesting. Sales person senses our inclination and encourages us to buy. There is a small timer like thing on the appliance that looks interesting. On inquiry, we are told that it is the timer but it does not work. The piece is broken and it is the only piece !

3. Again in Vivek's, this time we have decided to buy a Microwave. We are ready to pay but it is getting very delayed. On inquiry, the salesperson sheepishly asks us if we would be alright with the display model since there are no more in stock ! This after hard selling it to us for 10-15 minutes. We leave without it.

4. Over to Food World, I decide to head to one, even though it is a little far away from home since 2 years back, they used to be pretty decent. We start looking at some vegetables and lo and behold ! cockroaches ! In the vegetables, on juice packs, on every eatable thing in the store ! And nobody seems to be bothered. Tried finding a after shave for myself and most of the material on shelf for the brand I wanted was almost a year old (average life for after shave is 2 years).

5. Couldn't find a FM radio (radio only) in any of the electronics retail chains. Finally small shops and Sony showroom (with only 1 model which looked very retro, salesperson explained that only old people ask for stand alone radios and they like it big :)) ) came to rescue.

My over all experience of going to all these stores in past few days has been of going to a seconds sales ! The stock on shelfs seems old, salesperson not up to the mark and at other times, choice is just an illusion. If this is already the situation, product companies should be very worried about organized retail. I would feel much more comfortable dealing with a company person who actually knows about the product directly rather than go to a retail chain and hear half baked commentary of a sales person. Both of them have an agenda on mind but with the former, I know that before hand !

Coming back !

2008-06-27T19:53:00.003+05:30

After the marathon journey of 14 hours and a missed flight scare, I am sitting here on Mumbai airport waiting for the final connecting flight to Bangalore but it has still not completely sunk in. That I am finally back ! This single journey has changed so many things ! So many thoughts claiming my attention ! Nostalgia about the lovely friends I have left behind, many of whom I will never see again ! Leaving PhD and returning back with a MS from CMU, something which was a dream come true 2 years ago ! Being back home after 2 years ! For the first time in my life, no security cover in the form of a job or studies! The new personal life that awaits me in months ahead ! New developments, new life or a promise made 2 years ago is getting fulfilled? My tired and jet-lagged brain is not letting me think about any of these right now and the only thing I am able to worry about right now is my luggage, I hope I get to see it and take it through customs today only.

--------------

The luggage was found. Custom checks were cleared. And after 1 week in Bangalore, I am now in Lucknow, enjoying mangoes, home made food and tons of talking with my family. From 3rd, the new life starts in earnest. And all the good old things come back, starting with Girish Karnad on 10-11th July in Rangashankara ! :-)

Welcome back abhaga !

Learning the ropes

2008-05-27T22:58:00.001+05:30

A beautiful quote from a interview taken from an interview of Sean Johnson published by Coffee with Sunder .

Beyond a CS degree there are some obvious skills you need such as the ability to present to customers and at industry conferences. But more than a specific skill set, you need to develop a base of knowledge. You need to spend time with the sales organization learning how a deal progresses from an email address of a prospect to a closed deal 9 months later. You need to spend time with marketers to understand how hard and expensive it is to generate a quality lead. You need to spend time with quality assurance and support teams to understand the ramifications of ill defined features. You need to spend time with software executives to learn how a software business operates, how contracts are negotiated for example or how a partnership is put together. You need to learn the domain that your product is in and become something very close to a domain expert in it. You need to know your customers, their business, their challenges and their opportunities. You need to know your competitors as well.

More than anything though, you need to develop a comfort level with all of this so that you can say "no" to everyone when need be. You need to be able to tell a sales guy, "no", he can't have that feature to close that deal because you know it will never close anyway. You need to be able to tell an executive, "no" we can't ship it this quarter because it won't sell without a "widget segmenter" feature. You need to be able to tell an engineering manager "no", he can't have an extra 3 weeks to refactor the "widget segmenter" because it's just not going to matter to the customers. You need to be able to tell a marketer, "no" you can't build a product for that market segment, it has to be narrower. You need to be able to tell a customer, "no" he can't have that feature because it's not going to make his business problem go away. Products don't succeed because of "yes". Yes is easy, but not very useful in building an excellent product. It takes a lot of experience to get to "no".

POD is to Self-Publishing what Free is to Music

2008-05-25T02:50:00.004+05:30

The concept of self publishing is as old as books. Before the advent of modern publishing companies, people ended up publishing and distributing their own work.

It is said that the publishing industry has remained more or less the same since Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing in 15th century. Of course the printing presses have become increasingly sophisticated with the advance of technology, but the basic model has remained the same. This model can print many copies of a book quickly and cheaply once a certain amount of time has been invested in setting up the type. With the advent of mass market retailing in 20th century, this technology proved to be just the right match : print in bulk, distribute, return the unused, destroy. Books are printed in runs of few thousands and distributed to offline stores which can return back the unused copies later. The minimum number of copies required to make this process work ( to generate a profit for everybody along the chain) primarily determines which books get published and which are not. Self publishing, which would have been a norm before the publishing companies came along is quite unsustainable in this setting since that usually means one man (author) replacing the whole chain of publishing industry (printing, distributing, sales).

Enter the digital printing and suddenly, very short print runs are feasible, down to hundreds from thousands required in offset printing. In fact, there are companies who will happily print 20-25 copies for you. This allows publishers to become a lot more inclusive and a lot more adventurous. However, given that they are still part of the old supply chain and given that profit still needs to be generated for everybody in the chain, very small print runs are still not viable. So although the technology is now in place, business practices of traditional publishing still need to evolve.

But does the self publishing become a viable option with these very small print runs? After all the financial risk is almost negligible now, most authors can afford to pay for 100 copies easily, so a print run offering of 25 should suffice. I would argue that although that would seem to be the case, it is not so. Let me draw an analogy with music industry.

Let us say, you are a independent band who wants to release your songs yourself through the net. Suppose you decide to charge only 1 cent for every song you sell online. This is a very reasonable price tag. Almost free. But would it work like free? No. Because the moment any money is involved, you need an online payment system in place, you need to maintain accounts, your customers have to have a way to pay you (credit card, net banking), you have to build the whole security system in place so that people can not share, steel songs from you for free of cost and n number of other things. The point is : Making something free is a totally different business model that charging 1 cent for it although in terms of money they look almost the same.

Now coming back to publishing, a similar contrast can be seen between true Print on Demand vs a short digital run (20-25 copies). With short digital runs, somebody ( which is the author in most cases) has to maintain inventory, do the distribution, ensure delivery, bear losses on any unsold books, maintain accounts and promote his books. With POD, he only has to promote his books since there do not exist any unsold, pre-manufactured copies of the book. With short digital runs, books can go out of print, for short durations while you get a reprint, for long durations, when you no longer have energy left to fulfill the one off demand that comes once a month. With POD, it always stays in print. Even if it sells no copies for 1 year, it remains as much in stock.

The self-publishing in which author pays the publishing house to print their books, also known as vanity publishing has been around always. It can be offered with as many bells and whistles as one wants, it will remain what it is : a financial burden and hassle for the author. The game changer in this picture is Print on Demand. So if you are considering self-publishing your book, ask for true POD, because even 5 copies a bunch won't cut it.

Disclaimer : I am one of the founders of pothi.com which provides true Print on Demand supported services to self-publishing authors in India.

दो अधूरी कवितायें

2008-05-12T11:12:00.002+05:30

दो कवितायें। दोनो ही कुछ अधूरी सी पर जिन अहसासों से वो निकलीं थीं वो अब अपनी ताज़गी खो चुके हैं और इसलिये इनके पूरा हो पाने की ज्यादा उम्मीद शेष नही है। अतः जो कुछ भी है, हाज़िर है।

१)

पूरब रवि तत्पर आने को, पश्चिम मे विधु ढल जाने को,
धूमिल पडते जाते तारे, जग से अंधियारा भाग रहा ।
कल रात नयन से निद्रा का एक पल को मिलना हुआ नही,
पलकों मे बन्द रहीं आंखें, मन का दरवाज़ा खुला रहा।

कोई बुला रहा !

२)

हर एक दिल मे हमें दर्द बेहिसाब मिला ,
जब भी आंख खुली, चूर चूर ख्वाब मिला ।

सवाल जब भी उठे इश्क़ के, मोहब्बत के,
हर इक निगाह से एक टका सा जवाब मिला ।

मिला इतना अभागा, भर गया दामन मेरा,
गगन मिला, ज़मीं मिली, तुम्हारा साथ मिला ।

Barak Obama's Speech on Race

2008-05-11T05:15:00.003+05:30

I happened to watch today the speech by Barak Obama that he delivered shortly after the controversy about the comments made by his former pastor broke out. A more perfect union.

I must agree that it is a nice speech. He takes sometime to warm up, to get into the groove but then he is very fluent and impressive. Race is a very tochy issue and I am not familiar with the noraml political commentry on the subject in US. He delicately builds up his argument and sounds pretty convincing.

At one point of time during the speech he said that an easier thing to do would have been to simply denounce Rev. Wright but he is not doing that. I don't quite agree. I don't think that was a path available to him considering his strong black constituency. His strong point is not that he made a choice to walk the right path, he was pretty much forced to do so. The thing I liked was when pushed on the path, he walks it courageously, with confidence and comes out on top, turning what could have been a devastating moment for his campaign into an opportunity. I would like to believe that to be a characteristic of a strong leader although a leader is much better judged on his/her deeds than his/her words.

But despite the fact that I liked what he said, it gives me little hope. The reason is that I really doubt any candidate going to White House would dare to make bold changes to the foriegn policy or to the way the things work here. I love the American dream in its basic form, a dream that allows every individual an opportunity to realize his/her potential and american society has made a lot of progress towards that. However somewhere along the way, a SUV has gotten added to that dream, a culture of abundance, of unchecked consumption. Unfortunately I don't see any leader trying to change those things.

But anyway, good luck Barak Obama ! Your speech had many things that are very relevent to the situation in our own country today ! Hope our politicians can take a leaf out of your book for once.

Countdown to countdown...

2008-04-27T09:40:00.001+05:30

.. to go home ! I finally have my ticket in hand !! End of semester is keeping me busy and so countdown will start after the semester is over. In the meantime, I am counting down to that day :-)

The travails of first time enterprenuers

2008-04-27T07:16:00.004+05:30

I guess Jaya has been supplying everybody with a steady dose of what is happening with our startup and all the ups and downs. If not, head over to her blog to read all about it.

The only thing I might want to add is that all this is so much fun and it would be even more so if making all these mistakes wouldn't mean losing money, something which is always in short supply in a startup (yes, even when you have landed VC funding ( which we have not )). But it is okay I guess.

However this makes me ponder about the issue at a more general level, about what kind of policies and attitude from government can really help out those who are entering this new and strange world of CAs, Company Secretaries, Lawyers. I am sure the things have changed a lot in past few years and more and more processes have been streamlined. Incorporating a company can be as fast as 20 days for somebody reasonably familiar with the system and with small support. But still there remain so many small things that can pinch you at the wrong time and so make the whole experience rather intimidating. You always find yourself worrying about some tax or some form that might have skipped you during the process. After incorporating also, there are a whole slew of things that need to be done periodically like filing various kinds of taxes, having board meetings at regular intervals etc. and if you slip on one of them, there would be some penalty for that.

Now consider that for incorporating the company, you pay govt a lot of money (it depends on how much is your authorized capital but for large authorized capital ( the range of VC investments), it easily runs in lakhs). And you pay it as if you are paying a ransom to the govt so that it will allow you to start the business. This is where I think a little change in the attitude from the authorities can make a lot of difference. For a second imagine that instead of acting like the owner of the country, the govt treats you like a customer who has come to purchase the rights for doing business in the country. Wouldn't it be nice if:

1. Somewhere you can find a nice package with a simple English description of the process, a check list of the things you need to do, all the forms or their web-address and all the other information just like a university sends to its potential students.

2. Fantasizing some more, what if when you register a company, you get
a complementary personalized calender which marks all the deadlines you
have to follow? Or may be you can get a reminder of some sort before the deadline?

3. There are rules and then there are penalties for breaking them. But given that there are so many rules and given that somebody is new in the field, wouldn't it be a nice gesture if you can get a first time waiver for missing some tax deadline or forgetting to file some paper on time especially in the absence of 1 and 2?

There can be thousand other things that can be done to improve the overall experience, only thing needed is a attitude change.

However, looking from the other side, I would say this is an excellent opportunity for a startup. And in-fact there are consulting firms that will take care of these things for you for a price (reasonable or not is for you to decide) but our experience till now has been that there is no very serious effort in any of them to improve the user experience. Our consulting company did send us a pack of chocolates but no check list, no calender, no reminders of deadlines. Perhaps making the process too transparent is not in their interests but I will give them the benefit of doubt and say that this all goes back to the way our govt works and that affects how those who deal with govt on your behalf behave.

But the situation and availability of information is increasing. We will do our part in that by putting up the detailed information and pointers online once we are done. So with the hopes of a better tomorrow... :-)

(Disclaimer: None of this is not based on personal experiences i.e. we did not have to pay any fines or such. The experience with consulting firm ,however, is true.)

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NIST Machine Translation Workshop

2008-03-31T06:06:00.003+05:30

I was in DC last week to attend the follow-up workshop on the shared task that consumed the better part of my first 2 months this year. It is quite humbling to go to such a conference. A lot of people in the room had contributed something very significant to the area of MT in last 10 years and it is a pleasure to see them discussing things with each other and talk about the direction of the field.

The workshop had a rather competitive tinge to it with Google, Microsoft, BBN, IBM and other companies being there apart from many universities and everybody trying to win the bragging rights for next one year at least. What was funny however that most of the people doing MT at these places are relatively young and so most of them have worked together and published joint papers in last 4-5 years. I can count at least one joint paper between most pairs of companies. There were many advisor student pairs that are now in different competing companies. It is a nice little well knit community.

One depressing thing from my point of view was that most MT developers didn't seem too enthusiastic about newer methods of MT Evaluation something on which I have been working for part two years. To give a little background, MT Evaluation tries to build automatic metrics that can tell you how good a MT system is by comparing the output of the system with a gold standard translation done by humans. The field was pioneered by IBM and their paper of 2002 remains a de facto standard till date. There have been tons of papers on the topic and many short comings of IBM metric have been shown but nothing has been able to replace it. Primary reason seems to be that there are known techniques to tune the MT systems towards that metric that are easy, stable and fast and no MT developer seems willing to let go of that luxury. NIST is starting a evaluation campaign for MT Evaluation Metrics this year (I know it is getting ridiculous) and hope is to systematically compare existing metrics and develop better ones. The workshop for this year is in Hawaii but by that time I would be back in India. Too bad :(

Let me end by saying that for languages like Arabic, MT systems are actually getting very good and usable. You should definitely give them a try if you have not yet ! Google's online systems should give you a taste of state of the art pretty much.

If you cannot access pothi.com

2008-03-23T06:39:00.001+05:30

.. that is because we are trying to shift our site to different host. It should be back up soon. We are slowly moving towards having a more functional website before the end of the month. Hope to see you all there !

O Destiny !

2008-03-20T12:39:00.001+05:30

Who knew I would be playing 'Aashiq Banaya Aapne' ... again .. and again !

I want to shout out loud ...

2008-03-15T05:52:00.001+05:30

..everytime I read another blog post trying to build a case for somebody for staying in US or returning back to India. Someday I will collect all of them and publish them in a book called "A Study in Denial: How our education system is making us all into ostriches". I have read one today (as if you could not have guessed) and fortunately I found something today which quite suits the occassion. Here you go :

Fractal Wrongness

Ok, so may be that was a little too harsh :-) but doing human evaluations of MT output can do that to you !

हल्ला बोल

2008-02-04T09:23:00.001+05:30

पिछले शुक्रवार को तकरीबन १ माह से चल रहे NIST Machine Translation Evaluation का अंत हो गया और बहुत दिनों बाद चैन की सांस मिली। वैसे जो काम चल रहा था वह भी कुछ कम मज़ेदार नही था, काम था एक उर्दू से English मे अनुवाद करने का सिस्टम बनाना। इसी बहाने मैने उर्दू लिपी को थोडा बहुत पडना सीख लिया। इस पर आगे काम होगा कि नही यह तो नही पता पर अभी के नतीजों का बेसब्री से इंतज़ार है।

इतने दिन बाद मिले अवकाश का फ़ायदा उठाते हुये मैने जमा हो गये ई-मेल और ब्लाग पड डाले। उसी मे से एक ब्लाग से पी. साईनाथ का मैगासेसे अवार्ड मिलने के अवसर पर दिया गया व्क्तव्य पडने को मिला जिसने पूरे दिल-ओ-दिमाग को हिला दिया। किसानों की आत्महत्याओं के बारे मे पहले भी पडा था और तब भी बुरा लगा था पर उस वक्तव्य को पडने के बाद एक ऐसी बेचैनी का अनुभव होता है कि फ़ौरन ही इसके बारे मे कुछ किया जाये। मुझे पता नही मैं कब और क्या कर पाऊंगा पर अब मन मे ये बात अटक तो गयी है एक लम्बे समय के लिये । आप लोगों के लिये भी ये रही वो लिंक -

http://subalternstudies.com/?p=153

और करेले को नीम चडाते हुये आज मैने हल्ला बोल फ़िल्म देख ली। फ़िल्म कई स्तरों पर कमज़ोर है पर मेरी मनोस्थिती क असर कह लीजिये कि कल की कुछ करने की भावना अब और भडक उठी है। पता है कि अगले कुछ दिनों मे काम के बोझ के नीचे ये सब भी थोडा दब जायेगा पर गर्मियों मे देश पहुंचने के बाद ये फ़िर से ऊपर आयेगा इसकी पूरी गारन्टी है ।
साल की शुरुआत अच्छी हुई है। आगे देखते हैं कि क्या होता है ।

Delicious usability problem

2008-01-13T04:10:00.001+05:30

I recently started using delicious and I think I will stop pretty soon. Reason? No space allowe in tags and so every time I want a multi word tag, I find myself thinking if I want multiTag or multi_tag or multi-tag or some other version of it. I see that they have been aware of the problem but isn't this one of the first things that one would have noticed when starting to use the site? And even that post is now almost a year old.

I just got in the line for their limited preview of next version, I am hoping for something good enough and soon enough. Btw, any recommendations for online bookmark managment services?

New year and IE7

2008-01-02T12:41:00.000+05:30

Lots of new year love to whomsoever is reading this ! All the nice wishes and all sorts of wonderful things to you !

And now that all the love is done with, here is contempt. I had the misfortune of having to run IE7 because I was trying to test some website. I am amazed by the kind of effort they have put in to make it absolutely unusable. A lot of thinking must have gone into it. They have decided that script generated drop down boxes are bad for everybody. Doesn't matter even if you are a fucking I-write-browsers-over-weekend-who-knows-his-pop-ups kind. If IE has decided something is bad for you, you cannot have it. I have tried every recipe I could find on Google to turn off the annoying pop-up blocker and I am still waiting to see that drop-down menu.

Utterly butterly frustrating !

Spare me dear

2007-12-26T08:03:00.001+05:30

.. and dude too !

While somebody calling me a "dude" is merely annoying, somebody calling me "dear" (like in "How are you dear?" and not "Dear Abhaya, how are you?") feels downright cheesy to me. Of course the previous statement needs to be qualified with the assertion that both the addresses might be ok in some contexts or when used as part of the rhetoric. What I am complaining about is the stock version.

It is hard to pinpoint the root of these annoyances. Dude perhaps has to do with the mental images of dudes from college days and the slight negative connotation it carried in college lingo. With dear, things are not so simple. One visual image associated with dear is of nuns or teachers from convent schools or governances calling the children dear. Another one is of Jitender calling his better half as dear as in "tum abhi tak tayaar nahi huin dear? hum party ke liye late ho jaayenge !". It is hard to blame either of them for my bad feelings. Then what is it? I can also vaguely recall a movie in which one of the heroine's sidekicks used to call everybody a dear and that quite annoyed me. But now it is hard to say what came first, the annoyance with dear or the movie.

Anyone else has similar feelings at being called dear? Or is it just me?

Chat Agents: Humans and Bots

2007-12-23T04:59:00.001+05:30

I am sure some of these things already exist with a different name or are probably present in those mega expensive enterprise solutions that companies sell and companies buy but here are some ideas I have recently been thinking about.

Consider the live chat based support that is present on a lot of websites these days (Examples: lulu.com, backcountry.com). The idea is that if you want to talk to someone, you can start a chat right then and there rather than call customer support and spend 15-20 minutes on hold. It is a plus for the company also since they no longer need to maintain a call center (or outsource it). This is specially attractive for startups who cannot afford to spend a lot on customer support.

So how I imagine it must be working is that there is somebody sitting on the other side of the comp and probably talking with one or more customers at the same time. They would have many chat windows open or many tabs open, one for each customer. I would guess that even a trained support person would not be able to hold more than 4-5 customers simultaneously. What happens if more users are looking to chat than the available support staff can handle? Do we run into the same "please hold" thing?

In short, I have been wondering what tools we can build which would help optimize the ratio of customer to support staff in the chat based support scenario. One option is a chat-bot which I have heard deployed in some places (or are all these companies using chat-bots only and I am wasting my time?). How good are they, I have no idea but I would guess not a lot. And even if they are, they can be effective only for starting the conversation. At some point of time or for certain types of conversations, we would like a human to kick in. So let us think about the problem of one support person and many customers.

First thing would be to save the support person from the problem of switching focus between windows. I think a better interface would be like a chat room with the difference that only support person can see everyone and everyone else can see only him. Since we don't want to mix up the conversations, we can have the chat window separated into panes but one single message box to send messages to all of them. It should be possible to choose the panes by putting some markup in the message itself rather than switching focus explicitly. The @ notation that is used as a convention in public chat rooms can be used here: "@sunder I am not going. @ram that is a cool idea". Software should take care of sending the first message to Sunder's window and second to Ram's window. There can be IDE style completion which presents the drop-down of all the active user ids as one starts typing the @ symbol.

To push it a little too far, information filling tokens can be allowed which would be replaced with the actual information pulled form the database before finally sending the message. So a message might look like: "@Sunder We received your last payment on #last-payment-date# and your current balance is #due-amount#" which gets populated before sending in. This will save the effort of working with another application that pulls up the data and then transferring the data manually to the chat application.

A second and more tentative thing would be to have a mix of chat-bot and human where chat-bot can identify and handle parts of the conversation that are routine and human can chip in with the rest. So if a customer wants to know his account balance, it should be possible for chat-bot to handle that directly. Or the chat-bot can generate the text for the human and not send it directly. So as soon as one types @sunder, chat-bot can suggest the response to be sent and human can decide what to do ( although this may become more intrusive than helpful ). In fact by feeding on the chat transcripts of one human, chat-bots that generate text in his style should also be possible.

Any thoughts and pointers are very welcome.

Update: liveperson is a company that provide these softwares but don't know if they have these features or not.

Sorry !

2007-11-17T07:50:00.001+05:30

While walking to the school today, I came across a old lady. She was walking slowly on the sidewalk in the same direction. The sidewalk was narrow and there was not enough space for me to walk past her. So I walked slightly off the sidewalk on to the grass and crossed her.

As soon as I passed her by, I heard her say sorry. It was not a sorry that we just hand down to others every now and then. It sounded as if she was sorry that she is old now and cannot walk fast enough. It sounded as if she was sorry that she was walking in the middle of the sidewalk and thus blocking my way. It made me feel very bad. I wanted to stop and tell her that it was alright to be old and to walk slowly, that she need not worry too much about us young people walking slightly here and there because society is not meant for only young and active, it is meant for everybody and she has a right to be old and walk slowly without feeling bad.

Instead I said "it's alright" and moved on. Today was a bad day.

Xkcd

2007-11-10T07:21:00.001+05:30

Randall Munroe of xkcd fame was on campus today. Unfortunately I dozed off at my desk and missed his lecture (but read about it on Wikipedia just now which, surprize-o-surprize, is already updated with a short blurb about it).

I discovered xkcd few months ago, through the legendry angular momentum strip and it was an instant favourite. By next morning, I had finished all 300 odd strips and was hooked.

As the tag lines says, it is 'A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language', and physics and computer systems and pop culture. It is full of geek jokes, allusions that only a computer science graduate would understand and a celebration of nerdiness. However the best of the bread for me are those in which romance interplays with geekiness. They are just awesome. Here are some of my favorites. Find many more on the xkcd website. Enjoy and Happy Diwali !

OpenSocial : Developers vs Users

2007-11-09T07:26:00.001+05:30

OpenSocial form Google is the new big thing that everybody has been talking about, especially since it is being seen as a major blow back by the Google to the Facebook. It will allow developers to write one application and have it run on multiple social network sites. In other words, a Java for web apps (looks like Java has become too unfashinable since I saw this analogy hardly anywhere else). This is great news for developers. But what about users?

Users will now have a choice of thousands of applications since developer can actually spend time in creating new applications rather than try and make one application run across multiple sites. So consider, a flixter application that I found to be very cool and added to my profile page on Orkut, spent 2-3 hours adding all the movies to it and comparing notes with friends. Then I logged in to Facebook and found the same application and now I want to match my interests with my friends here. No problem, spend 2-3 hours, add all the movies and there you go. More networks? Absolutely cool ! Same application, same interface, same fun - every time ! After all the fun of using the application is really in filling up the data and OpenSocial makes it possible to do it again and again and again.Also, on different networks, my social graph differs. So if I want to watch a movie, I just need to go check the same application everywhere and decide.

Ok, I'll stop. I think everybody got the point and that is, having the same application everywhere may be nice for developer but it is not such a big deal for user till the data also starts moving between sites. With a social network based around eah and every niche, a very urgently felt need is to consolidate the data, something which OpenSocial doesn't address yet.

At this point, I must conceed that probably a lot of users do not face this situation of having very different social graph on two different sites. As long as you assume that there is only one primary social graph for a user, OpenSocial is actually great because now every new player that comes along with a brillient idea that needs an underlying social graph to run on, can just leverage the already present social graph instead of going off and build one of his own. But what happens if the site that owns the social graph, decides to kick out this application? It can be a set back but I guess the applications will still have the data that users filled them with and hence, should be able to survive on their own. Or it may happen the other way round that a new site can bootstrap itself off some other network and then spin off.

Of course, the question is if all the data is used in a open manner all around, who gets the money that is generated off it and how is it distributed? Nobody till date has figured out a sureshot way of monetizing a social graph. Facebook is betting on ad revenue and only time will tell if that will work. So the problem is two fold. First off, the social graph owners have no idea about how to make money off what they have. In addition, if they open the data and somebody else figures out a way to make money from that, it is not clear how will they get their share. So on what conditions should they open it and how much mashing up of this data should they allow is not clear.

Well so many questions and very few answers. My feeling is that somebody will take a bold move forward and that will either make or break the whole thing. But that needs to happen soon. When Orkut came along 3-4 years ago, I remember the enthusiasm around it, spending long time on it but slowly everybody around me is kind of loosing that enthusiasm, more and more people are becoming inactive. Probably OpenSocial can bring back some of that interest with some interesting applications. I am all eyes/ears :-)

PS: Tim O'Reilly also thinks that It's the data stupid ! (I read it before writing this post though I have been thinking about these issues for sometime now ).

धन तेरस and Wikipedia

2007-11-08T13:26:00.001+05:30

I donated some money to the Wikimedia foundation today and then realized that it was also धन तेरस (Dhan Teras, one of the days in this festival season, dedicated to Lakshmi, Goddess of wealth) today. It is a tradition to buy something new on this day, preferably made of metal. You can think this is as our own Indian thanksgiving in that sense but without discounts ! We being Indians, Gold is obviously the first choice but people buy all sorts of new things, cloths, utensils, jewelery, furniture, home furnishing etc.

Thinking in that respect, donating to Wikipedia seems like a good idea. I will have to see if this can be my own little way of celebrating Dhan Teras every year. Although it is often said that सरस्वती (Saraswati, Goddess of knowledge) and लक्ष्मी (Lakshmi, Goddess of money) don't go well together, where one lives, the other leaves, times seem to be all changing now :-) !

कूचा-ए-जाना

2007-11-05T03:42:00.001+05:30

चलें कूचा-ए-जाना से, शहर को देख कर आयें,
तबीयत भर गयी फ़ूलों से, कांटे देख कर आयें।

नये मौसम मे सुनते हैं, नये अंदाज़ हैं उनके,
बदल जायेगा दो दिन मे, नज़ारा देख कर आयें।

जो आयें तेरी महफ़िल मे, ना जायें फ़िर कहीं उठ कर,
कुछ आयें नये और कुछ सब ज़माना देख कर आयें।

वो पिछले मोड पर जो राह छूटी हमसफ़र छूटा,
कसक उठती है रह रह कर कि जायें देख कर आयें।

हवा मे घुल रहा है दर्द, फ़िज़ां हो चली गमगीं,
सुनाता है गज़ल फ़िर से अभागा, देख कर आयें।

Thinking Big but not like that !

2007-11-04T05:14:00.001+05:30

Before reading my post, read this post about the problem of Indian Entrepreneurs not thinking big enough. There was a followup post on the same blog that countered some of those point.

It was during undergrad days that I heard this argument for the first time. The biggest problem with people pitching their business plans in competitions, according to one of the judges, was that they were not asking for enough money ! It sounded quite counterintuitive to my middle class trained mind. My instincts told me to borrow as little as possible and to bootstrap as much as possible, the old Indian way of doing business as somebody later put it.

But I was naive back then, didn't understand the importance of capital, didn't understand the central premise of running a successful company in a capitalist setting i.e. growth ! Year after year, every year, growth in terms of bottom line, revenue, profits ! Because although we start out with customers, with efforts to solve a problem they are facing, we end up running the show for investors and for share holders who want return on the money they have invested. VCs want a return of 10-20 times in a framework of 3-5 years, so they want entrepreneurs to focus on big market opportunities, billion $ markets and they want companies to dominate those markets. I have no issues with dominating the markets, I have no issues with 10-20 times the returns. I have problem with the way market size is estimated and profits are measured!

A market essentially breaks down into two components. Number of customers and how much each customer is willing to pay for your product. Now Indian market is very price sensitive, something that I admire. Everything should be priced for what it is worth, it may be costly but it should be worth it. It should not be costly because it can be, something known as "charging a premium" in business terms. Another problem is that Indian market is highly fragmented. Uniform means of accessing the market are virtually non existent in most of the industries. The great enabler Internet reaches a small minority of the country. Mobiles a little more. Organized retail will perhaps reach to slightly more in few years. So the easily accessible part of the market remains small.

Faced with such conditions, what should a new company do? It is difficult, unless you are operating at the scale of Reliance or Bharti, to reach out to a large population. At the same time, the small part of the population you can reach easily, is also the most wealthy, those who are learning the first lessons of consumerism, those who can and will spend. So to get a big market size, you charge premium. And that is the trend we see. Start looking at the burgeoning startup space in India and you will see tons of startups for people who can access Internet, who are urban. Some of the startups are selling something, others are hoping to get enough ad revenue.

On the other hand, it is only the big players that are expanding into the markets beyond that. Organized retail, printing, telecom are the spaces left for giants. What effect will that have on our own home grown entrepreneurs, those who are called unorganized sector is a post for another day. But in my mind this is a very clear dividing line currently. We may talk of inclusive development and bring down the fruits of free economy to everybody but the real promise of a free economy, entrepreneurism that will be primary driver of that aim, is being held back by the old notions of big markets and big profits. The article I linked above says,

Ask: what does it take to dominate the market opportunity? Capital availability is the easy part. The hard part is building out the product/service, hiring globally scalable talent, and penetrating global markets. Capital will make this happen in large part. And the ability to think big (obviously backed by a clear focus and execution plan) will make the capital happen!

I think capital availability is easy for those who are playing by your rules, to those who are going after markets that promise Billions and double digit growths. And if such a market is not available in India, we can always go global. But what about the huge but highly fragmented market that remains untapped within our own country? We can always offer medical tourism when our own citizens will not get medical health. We can do cheap printing for other markets when thousands in our own country go without books to read. And this is because markets are defined by purchasing power and not by need.

Let me take a example. Consider the blind people in India, around 10 million of them. They are probably quite a fringe part of the so called market. There is no dearth of opportunities for those who want to make something to specifically target them but first there are only 10 million of them and second, not a whole lot of them can afford to pay a premium and so market opportunity in traditional terms remains small. Will there be capital available for those who want to entertain this part of the market or must they forever be served by NGOs and CSR initiatives?

And this is what my gripe is with this concept of thinking big. I think it is very limiting to think big if that must only be in terms of money. I love big opportunities but they can be big in n number of ways, in impact, in terms of serving a part that will forever remain neglected otherwise or in terms of the problem they are trying to handle. They may need more than 3-5 years, they may not grow as fast. Read this excellent Nobel prize acceptance speech by Mohammad Yunus, specially the section on Free Market Economy where he describes the Grameen Bank's social business.

Fortunately, as always, we have people already working on this. The second article linked above talks about SKS Microfinance, something which has received VC funding actually. Another one is Eko. And I am sure there are many more which I have simply not heard of. So while social networks, video sharing may be nice and 'big' , unfortunately they will not bring in the real fruits of this free economy. For that we will need to plant new trees instead of just aiming for tree tops.

Where I get to blame Google for my laziness !

2007-10-16T11:28:00.001+05:30

A big reason for my decreased frequency of blogging had to do with Google launching the Hindi Transliterator in blogger. While, like every red blood Hindi lover, I was also very much pleased by the turn of events, the joy was short lived. Very soon, I discovered that on Linux Firefox version 1.5, the on line blogger editor became very very slow. So slow that I can type 1-2 sentences and than sit back and watch as it works very hard to bring the characters in view one by one, at the speed of around 1 character per second. And this is not in transliteration mode but in normal English typing mode. Now being a busy grad student that I am, I spend a large part of my day and night in my office and away from my laptop. So it was a sad situation.

Finally I started looking around for an alternative blog editor and after some false starts, landed at ScribeFire from performancing which is an extension for Firefox. From the first looks, it seems to be quite fast and have all the basic facilities in place, though I haven't yet figured out the categories business with it. I am hoping that this will be a durable solution but you never know. If you guys have any suggestions for desktop blogging tools for Linux, please leave a comment.

Days ahead !

2007-10-14T03:28:00.001+05:30

These are some heady days in my life. Lots of things happening and at times I get the feeling that everything might just slip away. And often times I remind myself that what you have is not what you hold in your fist but that which rests on your open palm.

So the big news is that I am going back to India next year. Things moved fast and there are chances of a startup looming on the horizon, already threatening to block the sun of rationality and rob the clarity out of life. Let us see where it goes.

Back from the future, in the present, there are some more things to be excited about. For next few months I am going to work on a Urdu to English Machine Translation System. Now given the state of the art, you can be sure that this MT system will be pretty useless for almost any use. What is exciting however is that it may produce as a side effect some nice tools for Urdu, conversion of Urdu script into Devanagari being one of them, an issue close to my heart. For the starters though, Bhomiyo already seem to have something along these lines up and running. It has problems but it is a start and a good one. I can already read BBC Urdu :-).

What the future holds !

2007-10-12T13:23:00.000+05:30

Next week promises to be very special. Kalaam is coming to CMU on 16-17th and then on 18th, I am flying to Boston to attend a one day workshop in MIT and guess what ! Noam Chomsky is going to be there.

Exciting Times !

From India, in Hindi

2007-09-30T21:31:00.001+05:30

..couple of books, self published and printed on demand. Jaya at Miles to go is offering her poems in a book form. Also available is a book of poems from Flying Bird's blog. Head over if like me you also enjoy it the good old way, on paper, in ink :-).

One level down and counting

2007-08-27T11:56:00.001+05:30

This landed in my in-box today. Offered with no comments.

dear friends
one of my friends needs advice on how his brother needs to prepare for getting admitted to bansal classes. if you know anyone who could help, please reply to this mail.

thanks,
xxxx

Language Digest - 6 [Language and Development]

2007-08-20T06:35:00.001+05:30

After a long time, some language related articles. It is no secret how powers that be have often tried to control the nature of public discourse by introducing new words for old ways and substituting neutral sounding words for words having negative connotations. As it turns out, they are often successful, thus giving little credibility to the famous Shakespearian adage of what's in a name.

In this piece on India Together, Shripad Dharmadhikary points out the changing language of development debate in India. Irrespective of which side of the fence you are on, it makes sense to know the tricks of the trade.

And if you ever doubted the power of sentence restructuring, perhaps this will convince you otherwise. How should we think about our farmer's?

PS: This post is 201st post on Basket Case. It took almost 3.5 years which would mean on average 1 post per week, though as usual that statistics hides more than it reveals :-)

The why of Brain Drain

2007-08-18T04:06:00.001+05:30

Let me pick up this thread from my last post. I lamented there about the lack of higher education (PhD level) opportunities India. That is one of the reasons I am here. But make no mistake, majority of the Indian students who come to states every year, do not come here to get educated. That degree they get is just a stepping stone to this land of opportunities. In most cases, it is not even the oft repeated story of becoming used to things here and finding it difficult to return back. They made up their minds long before the passports were stamped and bags were packed.

Considering that the job market in India is booming like nothing before, markets are open and shops are full, why do people still leave? And for most of them, money is not in short supply, these are not the people who didn't get the opportunity or faced oppression. In fact most of them belong to the most privileged class of people. And I don't know what you thought when Haneef after everything that happened, asked the Australian PM for honorary citizenship to Australia.

I think Reality Check has a point.

Pardon me for the following statement, but there is a reason why Indians flock to Western (read "white mans") countries. Even after such alleged mistreatment, why must Haneef fight deportation? Why cant he just say, "To hell with you and your laws" - and return to India ?
I have asked this question to many NRI folks, the answers range from better environment, freedom, tastier fruits and thicker milk, to roads, to 911. I suspect the real answer is along the lines of , "Hey, we can let these white guys do all the nation building (or maintaining). We will let them deal with root issues maintaining the sanctity of the constitution, coming up with laws, the environment, and basic liberties. That would be cool because we can just focus on our jobs. All we have to do is follow a well codified set of rules. We get our promotions, our house, and cars. How easy is that ?"

The problem is apathy. I know so many around me who couldn't careless about the world around them and being an immigrant in another country affords you just that.

On Independence Day

2007-08-17T10:33:00.001+05:30

In the ever growing list of days to celebrate, Independence Day has started looking more and more like any other of them. In the world that I inhibit or am forced to inhibit, these days are marked by a surge in Orkut messages, group mails, gestures so meaningless that I am amazed over and over again (like changing your Orkut profile pick to Indian Flag on 15th Aug). Nonetheless, Independence still brings back the memories from the past, from the days of innocence when it was so easy to believe in things. Back than the morning actually felt a little special on such days and heart felt a little extra spring.

But I am in in a different place and in different times now. In US, 4th of July is celebrated in form of sales and deals. Yes, there are fireworks all over the place and probably other ceremonies which I am not aware of yet but there are also cheap things to be bought. Not as many as on Labor Day or on Thanks Giving or on New Year but still some. Thankfully, Indian community probably has not been identified as a targeted consumer group yet and so no special discounts on 15th Aug yet.

CMU Indian community, however, has a nice way of celebrating it. There is an old tradition of fence painting here. There is a fence in the middle of the campus and whatever is painted on it previous night, stays for all of next day. So every year on 14th Aug night, it is painted with tri colors which stay on for all of 15th Aug. Looking at it next day feels nice and a little warm in this distant land.

Incidentally, 14th Aug is also the day every year when orientation for new International students starts in CMU. Many of the new Indian students, feeling more patriotic than ever before come to the function and excited talk about the first day of orientation. I find it a little ironic as I mentioned on this blog last year. I heard that this year somebody described the pride she felt when in the morning she saw so many Indians among the new students.

That set me thinking. What is it that she felt proud of? No doubt, coming to CMU is a personal achievement for many, a moment of pride. I would be lying if I deny that I felt the same when I got admitted. This is one of the best places to get educated in certain fields and to do world class research. I am glad I am here. But then I wonder, why did I have to come here to do research and get good education? I will not speak on behalf of anyone but I personally would have preferred to stay back and do my PhD in India. I am here because there were no decent places for doing that. My dreams and aspirations have my country built into them but to fulfill them, I have to spend these 4-5-6 years in this foreign land. When I think like that, I feel my being here, of all those new students being here is not a moment of pride for my country, it is rather a moment of introspection.

Happy Independence Day !

Past two months and some

2007-08-08T18:47:00.001+05:30

Note: The post was written 2 days ago, so please adjust the timeline accordingly.

A lot of time has passed. Almost four years since I graduated, almost 1 years since I came to US, almost 1 month since I returned from San Diego/ Bay Area trip, almost 1 week since I moved into this new house, almost 1 day since I returned from the whitewater rafting trip from Ohiopyle. Somewhere along that time-line lies the one and a half months mark since I have not posted. Not that I was totally gone, I wrote somethings on wasted margins.

So now you know that I have changed houses, have been on a couple of trips and read couple of books. During those trips, I visited Coronado beach and La Jolla coves in San Diego, met a lot of old friends, some of them already finishing up their PhD and staring a new phase in life, visited the famous Golden gate bridge, ate a one pound crab and learned a lot about its anatomy along the way, lost and found my phone, sat in a train after almost one year, rafted (guided) the 7 mile stretch on the lower yough, pulled 3 people out of water along the way :-) and managed to stay on board myself. Since the trip required no experience, the safety-excitement tradeoff was there. I am looking forward to do something more exciting next.

Moving to the new place a week for that proved to be much more tiring than we imagined it to be. Thanks to the driving skills of a friend and a canceled trip by my roommate, we managed to successfully shift two households into new places over 3 days. The nice thing is that many of my friends have all moved to close by places now and many others were already here. So we have quite a crowd around and the locality is much much better, look-wise and safety-wise, compared to the previous one. I am hoping to not move from this place unless something drastic forces me to.

Although I avoid writing about it here, work is not exactly going great guns at the moment. There were big plans for summers but the summers are now gone, leaving plans behind along with a missed deadline. The whooshing sound it made as it flew by was no consolation either. Coupled with a string of negative results, that has cast a little gloom but nothing to worry. We are working on it !

BTW, congratulations to Diwaker Gupta of Floating Sun fame on getting engaged. Couple of other friends have got engaged/married. I wish a great life and all the happiness to them.

Stay tuned !

Amazon : Search Inside

2007-06-22T06:53:00.001+05:30

Recently I have been buying some books from Amazon and I think the Search Inside feature totally rocks ! Especially in a place like Amazon that shows related and similar books (which is again quite accurate), it is easy to get confused while choosing. Moreover often the titles of the books and reader reviews help little in the process of choosing since every decent enough book will have somebody giving it raving review and somebody else calling it names.

With search inside feature however, you can actually see the contents and read few pages. This makes the whole process much more personalize and much closer to the experience of buying books from an actual store. I believe that those not providing this facility for their books, stand to loose in the long run.

Running

2007-06-19T19:11:00.001+05:30

Finally after years of contemplation and after some false starts, I made another start towards running yesterday. This time I hope I will go some distance (pun intended).

Just like flying which I know is close to impossible, I have long dreamed about running. Running not to narrow my waistline, not the endless rounds in a closed stadium or even sprinting. I have always wanted to run outdoors and run long distances. To go places while running. If it sounds like inspired by Forrest Gump, it probably is.

In fact just like almost everything in that movie, that running was also a allusion to something in contemporary USA. Running is a obsession in USA. People run here everywhere, every time and every weather. I have seen people running at mid night in the middle of the road because the sidewalk was chocked with snow ! And I have seen males, females, teenagers, old people, very old people all of them run. And I love seeing it. Those sweating bodies, those long and steady strides, those agonized faces ! But as someone said,

" To describe the agony of a marathon to someone who's never run it is like trying to explain color to someone who was born blind. "
Jerome Drayton

I will probably never run a marathon but hopefully someday I will be able to run enough distance to feel that agony.

Coming to think of it, running seems so much like doing Number Theory, another one of my long held desires ! Both are very simple to get into, you require no special equipment and only thing required to get started is your willingness. However this simplicity belies the hardness of doing anything substantial in them. Runners hit the wall and Number Theorists run in to things like Fermat's Last Theorem. However the sweet pain of getting stuck in a problem and of pushing yourself beyond your limits is what creates the craving for them.

I think following quote by Jesse Owens captures the feeling perfectly.

"I always loved running...it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs."
Jesse Owens

Bill Gates gets it right !

2007-06-14T03:21:00.001+05:30

I never hoped he will ! In fact when I saw the forwarded mail in my inbox, I felt slightly irritated. What with all the commencement speeches being forwarded. I am sure at this rate and given the consumerist society we live in, we will be able to buy a collector's edition of these speeches very soon !

So I reluctantly opened it up and expected the now old formula speech of most-dramatic-events-of-my-life, the recent speech by Narayan Murthy at NYU being one very bad example (but people seem to be getting inspired by that also !!). As I have mentioned before on this blog, my disillusionment with such speeches started after I saw the video of Steve Jobs delivering his wonderfully written piece at Stanford. His presentation had no life, no soul and for me, no inspiration either.

But to my pleasant surprise, Bill got this one right ! Looking back, Steve Jobs and Narayan Murthy sound like 2 narcissists now. And this when I had much less sympathies for Bill Gates than for Narayan Murthy to start with. Anyway, I guess I will let you read the speech for yourself and decide. To me he said all the right things, things that we need to realize most in today's world, things that you me and all others need to give a good piece of our minds.

Here is the text of the speech.

मन

2007-06-01T21:05:00.001+05:30

इस नयी ज़मीं पर मैने था जब धरा कदम,
"मन लगता तो है?" पूछा जाता था हरदम।
शुभचिंतक सब चिंता करते थे घड़ी घड़ी,
यारों के मुंह से थी गुड लक की लगी झड़ी।

अन्जान डोर एक थाम चल पड़े थे हम भी,
मन मे थी थोड़ी खुशी और थोड़े गम भी।
जिस ओर उठायी नज़र, मिला कुछ नया नया,
उठ पायें कदम उससे पहले मन गया गया।

नित नये नये आकर्षण मन को बहलाते,
हम उत्साहित हो हो प्रियजन को बतलाते।
उत्साह भरे स्वर ने उनको आभास दिया,
हो गया अभागा वैल सैटल, अहसास दिया।

तब से अब तक कुछ एक बरस है बीत चुका,
और पात्र नयेपन की मदिरा का रीत चुका।
अब मन यथार्थ की भूमि पर नंगे पांव,
ढूंढा करता स्मृतियों की ठंडी छांव।

जिन प्रश्नों पर हम गये बरस थे झल्लाते,
अब उनके उत्तर ख़ुद को ही हैं दोहराते।
"मन लगता तो है?" पूछा जाता था हरदम,
मन लौट गया है देश, यहां तन्हा हैं हम।

The vows of scripts

2007-05-23T11:35:00.001+05:30

I have often read/heard people rant about the bad status of Urdu in Hindi heartland, place where it originated and from where some of its best poets and writers came. Cities like Aligarh, Lucknow used to be centers of Urdu adab but no longer.

As usual blame goes to the government, a claim of systematic bias against Urdu due to which it was removed as a medium of instruction by the early governments of UP. It was only in the last decade that Urdu was again given the status of official language in UP and that too because of political considerations and not any love for the language.

I have no reason or evidence to doubt that indeed there might have been bias against Urdu in the years right after Independence. Partition and creation of Pakistan, the usual association of Muslims and Urdu, adoption of Urdu as the official language in Pakistan may all have played out in the minds of early policy makers, consciously or unconsciously. But even before partition, Hindi literature saw very strong movement towards more Sanskrit oriented vocabulary and attempts to replace Persian, Arabic and Desi words. This lead to the creation of some Hindi literature that was beyond the understanding of large masses because the spoken and day to day language retained its character and vocabulary.

I however have a very different caveat and my own explanation of why Urdu continues to suffer and I draw from my own personal experience. First thing to point out is that I have come across many people who wish they could read and understand Urdu. Urdu has a special appeal to young, primarily because of its poetry, its sher-o-shayari that is almost entirely love poetry. So the question remains, why does it continues to loose ground then?

I think one of the main reason is the almost exclusive use of Arabic script to write Urdu. I come from Lucknow and my language has a fair amount of Urdu but if you write something in Urdu in front of me, I cannot read it at all. If somebody could read it to me, I would understand but I am paralyzed by this lack of reading ability. USA and Britain are called two nations divided by the same language. I think Hindi and Urdu remain the same language divided by a script. Just by removing this high entry barrier, we can be sure that Urdu will attract many more admirers and pursuers. But just like religion, matters of languages are sensitive. I don't know how deep, if any, the attachment to the script runs but I once hared that Basheer Badr's original poetry collections were available in only Arabic script for a long time.

I have been making efforts to learn Urdu script to be able to read more of poetry and probably some other literature as well. My interest is strong enough to do it. Majority of the people just give up and rely on whatever small they can find or get their hands on which is really sad. Urdu is a beautiful language and I believe that making it readable without extra effort will go much further than an artificial identity forged around a script.

To a teacher !

2007-05-10T04:46:00.000+05:30

It was around this time last year when the whole reservation saga started or must I say the recent wave of reservation saga started. At the helm of the ensuing crisis was AIIMS and its director P Venugopal. The fight have mutated into legal battles since then but he continues to face the music in increasingly ridiculous ways.
Watch the following and see if this rings any bells.

सागर किनारे

2007-03-26T06:06:00.000+05:30

आज जाने क्यों बैठे बैठे मन मे पांडिचेरी का ख़्याल आ गया । लगभग २ साल हुए जब मैं पहली बार वहां गया था। बहुत सुना था उसके बारे मे पर पहली नज़र मे तो थोड़ी निराशा ही हुई थी। ग़लती शायद जगह की कम और साथ वालों की ज्यादा थी पर जब वापस लौटे तो उतनी ख़ुशी नही थी मन मे। कुछ ठगा सा महसूस कर रहा था, क्या मालूम था कि अपना थोडा सा मन वहीं छोड़ा आया था ।

उसके बाद से एक बार वहां जाना और हुआ पर मात्र एक दिन के लिए और आज अचानक यहाँ अमरीका मे बैठे बैठे मुझे याद आ भी रहा है तो पांडिचेरी ना कि दूसरे अनेक ऐसे स्थान जहाँ के यात्रा अनुभव कहीं अधिक स्मरणीय हैं । मुझे पता है कि कारण क्या है। मेरा मन पांडिचेरी की गलियों मे नही, उसके समुद्र के किनारे कहीं छूट गया है । असल मे पांडिचेरी ही एक मात्र ऐसी जगह है जहां मैं कुछ घंटों से ज्यादा, असल मे कुछ दिन तक समुद्र के पास रह सका हूँ । और गरजते समुद्र के सानिध्य मे कुछ पल बिताने जैसे अनुभव इस संसार मे कम ही हैं । आप अपने ह्रदय की कोई भी झंकार उन लहरों के गर्जन मे सुन सकते हैं और वो उमड़ती लहरें, एक मंझे हुए अभिनेता की भांति , एक धीर श्रोता से लेकर एक चुनौती देते प्रतिद्वंदी तक सभी पात्र सहजता से निभा लेती हैं । एक ऐसा साथी जिसके पास उतना ही समय है जितना आपके पास है, ना एक मिनट ज्यादा और ना एक मिनट कम ।

आज के जमाने मे ऐसे साथी कहॉ मिलते हैं और जब मिल जाते हैं तो छोडे कहां जाते हैं। देखिए ना, हज़ारों मील दूर भी पुकार साफ सुनाई देती है ।

Speaking your heart out

2007-03-10T22:31:00.001+05:30

As you get ready to walk up and take stage, your hands get moist, your feet give out that strange sensation of standing on top of a 100 story building, suddenly you need to go to loo, your throat is dry, your heart is going to stop. The place is not even well lighted but you feel all the spotlight on your face, as words come out you cannot even remember to breath and then you take one deep breath and ...

... you either loose it or you flow.

In my 14-15 odd years of public speaking, I have gone through this numerous times and I have been on both sides of the line. I have screwed it all up and I have taken the day. But what has not changed is the thrill, that rush of Adrenalin. Yes, like a drug addict, small doses don't satisfy the craving that much now and with the college life gone, even those small doses don't come my way any longer.

I realized this a few days ago that I have hardly stood up to speak in the last 2 and a half years since leaving college and that realization has reignited the craving. So much so that I am looking forward to my 2-3 class project presentations coming up later this semester. However, I am also a little skeptical. The audience I will have here would be so different from anything I have had before. Would I be able to connect to them? Would I be able to command all the nuances of English to bear upon my points as I used to in Hindi or let's say Hinglish? What about his tricky thing called sense of humor, do I even have one in context of Americans? And just how would I make up for all the cultural references which just became out of bounds?

Challenges are many. Perhaps this is the next stage of evolution for me as a speaker, moving from a frog in a small pond to the whole new world. Now I can choose to become a cautious, methodical and a won't-screw-up kind of speaker after whose talk people clap and mumble and forget. Or I can still try to go all out, speak from my heart and try to connect.

Of course I will screw up at times if I choose to be later but would that really matter? I am suddenly reminded of a very good example in this context. In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford. I received its text from some friend and was so delighted that I really wished if I could have been there to actually listen to it. Some months later, I discovered its video on youtube and after 2-3 minutes into it, I was so disgusted that I left it in between. Those powerful words that seemed so inspiring then actually look so hollow now that I can't even bring myself to read them again.

It is a speech that draws heavily from Steve's own life, beautifully joining the dots as he himself calls it. It is a speech that has to come directly from heart. And when you look at the video, you see a Steve Jobs standing there, reading it out from paper, not even looking up for half of the time and words which have so much emotions in them are just falling out like some dry stones. I was shocked but this was the first time I was listening to him so I gave him benefit of doubt. I decided to check out his keynotes in apple conferences to see if this is his normal talking style. But lo and behold ! there is the same Steve Jobs striding across the big stage, with a huge screen in the background, no paper in hand and you can see the passion, the enthusiasm now.

I don't know what to conclude about Jobs from this but what I know is that I never ever want to give a speech like that commencement speech to anyone. I think he ruined their day though somehow I saw all of them feeling very happy and cheering him. Perhaps he has too much money and is too successful for these things to matter or perhaps this is the cultural difference that I talked about earlier.

I just hope that honesty and passion would cut across these barriers.

मुलाकात

2007-03-05T20:06:00.001+05:30

दो दिन का तेरा मिलना जाने क्या क्या रंग दिखलायेगा,
मिलने की होगी खुशी या ग़म जाने का तेरे सतायेगा।

जो गले लगाऊंगा तो आंखें बोलेंगी दीदार करूं,
जो दूर हटा तो मन बांहों मे भरने को ललचायेगा।

यूं तो मुझको पर्याप्त नही जीवन भर भी तेरा मिलना,
और यूं दो पल का मिलना भी दिल गांठ बांध इतरायेगा।

बरसों फ़ैले बंजर मे ये दो कदमों का फ़िरदौस सनम,
आंखों मे भर दिल बंजारा, हंसकर आगे बड जायेगा।

हम साथ तेरे फ़िर से जो दिल की बंद पोटअलिया खोलेंगे,
कुछ लाद सकेंगे साथ और कुछ वहीं धरा रह जायेगा।

दिल का ना पूछो हाल, अभागा पगला है, दीवाना है,
दो दिन को धडकेगा फ़िर वापस ढर्रे पर आ जायेगा।

गूगल समाचार अब हिन्दी मे !

2007-03-01T20:39:00.001+05:30

तुलसी की लिखी हुई चौपाई याद आ गयी आज, "अति आनन्द उमगि अनुरागा..." जब गूगल के हिन्दी समाचार प्रष्ठ पर नज़र पडी तो। ना जाने कितनी बार google news India पर नीचे की सूची मे जा कर देखा था और सोचा था कि अगर यहां हिन्दी भी होती तो कितना अच्छा रहता। अब वह मनोकामना पूर्ण हो गयी है।

गूगल समाचार का आना सिर्फ़ एक भाषा प्रेमी का व्यर्थ का उत्साह नही है। इसके अनेक ऐसे फ़ायदे हैं जो कि शायद पहली नज़र ने दिखते नही हैं। अव्वल तो ये कि अब अलग अलग जाल प्रष्ठों को देख्ने के लिये अलग अलग फ़ोंट लगाते रहने की आवश्यक्ता नही है, जोकि हमारे आपके जैसे लोगों के लिये तो सिर्फ़ एक छोटी सी समस्या भर हो सकती है पर अनेकानेक लोगों के लिये बस वही अन्त हो जाता है। साथ ही साथ यूनीकोड मे होने से समाचारों को ढूंढना भी सरल हो जाता है।

पर इस सबसे बड कर बात है कि भाषा बदलने से समाचार पत्रों का पूर नज़रिया भी बदल जाता है। Google News India से अभी तक समाचारों की जो झलक मिलती थी वो अंगरेज़ी मीडिया के द्रष्टिकोण से दिखती थी, उन्हे क्या महत्वपूर्ण लगता है क्या नही वगैरह। हिन्दी समाचार पत्रों का द्रष्टिकोण इससे काफ़ी अलग हो सकता है। मेरे विचार से उस नज़रिये को भी पाठकों तक पहुचाना गूगल समाचार की सबसे बडी उपलब्धि है।

तो आप भी पडिये और आनन्द उठाइये।

From machines with love

2007-02-24T22:37:00.001+05:30

There are some moments which make you realize the power of perspective in how we see the world and these moment catch you at most unexpected of times.

A new computer science campus in under construction on campus. It is right next to the Newell Simon hall where my dept is situated currently. At the ground floor, there is a huge window which looks down upon the ditch where the new building is coming up.

Few days ago, I decided to eat my lunch sitting right next to the huge window looking at the beautiful scene outside what with all the snow covering almost everything. There were some big machines working in at the site. From where I was sitting, I could only see their front part and not the main cabin where the driver sits. They were moving soil and filling up some part of the ditch.

I looked at them for some time and after few minutes it was so easy to believe that they are some huge odd looking autonomous things working on their own. I have read a lot of science fiction in which machines do all sorts of wonderful things, gain a consciousness and even over take the world. Sitting there watching those big crude machines making short graceful movements, I could believe all of that.

But even more than a futuristic vision I felt like I had felt while reading the first part of Specimen Days where a child thinks that machines, big mean machines love their operators and try to grab them as soon as they get a chance. In that world, a old and unsophisticated world, humans and machines co exist in a sort of love hate relationship, not out to destroy one another but still coming to terms with each other, or rather humans coming to terms with machines. Once you start understanding that world, it looks very scary.

That day I felt like I got a glimpse into that world.

The B'day cake

2007-02-23T06:42:00.002+05:30

I am not sure if there exists any soul on this earth who actually enjoys having a cake all over his/her face on his/her b'day. Still year after year the trend goes on as is evident by the mandatory presence of a "caked face" snap in all the photo albums on Orkut and else where. If nobody likes it (as was indicated by a quick survey I conducted on some of my friends and found only one supporter), then the question is why does it go on? Well I have some theories as always :-)

1. It is encouraged by those who don't like cake. So this way they can bring out all their hidden contempt for cake and do the worst that they can do to it i.e. waste it.

2. A slightly less skeptic view says that people are trying to take revenge for what happens to them on their b'days. So it is a vicious cycle in which we are loosing both fun and cake.

3. A more rational explanation by my sister. She says that people do not like to have it on their own face but they really enjoy putting it on others' faces. Now at any point of time, there is only one person who dislikes the act and many more who like it and so the total amount of happiness generated is more. This is what makes it happen year after year. While this sounds much more logical, this also reflects pretty badly on us. It says that we inherently have double standards and that all of us are a little bit of sadist in our hearts.

So which one of the above fits you best? None? Then you belong to the majority that almost never knows why they are doing what they are doing but since everybody else is doing it, so are they. This is worst. There are so many reasons why it is bad idea to waste a cake like this, you most probably don't like it also and still you are doing it year after year without even knowing why.

As you may have guessed, I absolutely hate it and would go to any length to avoid it. I have bought myself fruit cake instead of a cream cake just to avoid this ritual. I am glad that people around me have been understanding and I have never faced a ugly situation. I am thinking of starting to refuse to step into or click any photographs in a party where a person has cake on his face.

Let me suggest some alternatives. If you don't like cake, say it out aloud and refuse to eat it. It's not a crime to not like cake. If you are trying to take revenge, best is to not it happen to you to start with and remove the reason to take revenge. And if you really really enjoy it, carry some colors or something else, something not eatable at least, to put on the face. Wasting food is criminal.

(This was prompted by the images of faces covered in cake in Orkut albums and soon to come Holi.)

Social Networks and patterns

2007-02-22T11:05:00.001+05:30

No more poetry, I promise. For sometime at least :-).

I have spend at least a dozen hours in last one week going around orkut randomly. Well, not randomly, there are so many interesting games you can make out of randomness. Like you visit the top most friend of the person you are visiting now and see if you come back to familiar circle or not. If you do, you find out a new way of connections that you didn't know existed before. Or you can surf going only through girls/boys profiles which at time can hit a road block.

While doing all this, I see patterns, very vague ones and in almost all the cases, false ones owing to the nature of human brain which does a selecting strengthening of evidence. But they are interesting anyway. One of those observations is that a good looking person also seems to have on average, good looking (or photogenic if you want to be technically correct) friends. Another one is that often people who have not put up their own picture in profile , will have more friends of similar kind. As you can see, these observations are wrong right on their face. Of course, for any one example in favor, you will find thousands against it.

However my guess is that it still occurs more often than you would expect it to be out of pure chance. That is, given that there is nothing special happening, even then by a sheer chance of luck, you may come across a person who has above characteristic. You may expect to find only one such person in 10k people. My guess is you will find more than one. Has anybody else observed something similar?

अदा

2007-02-20T12:21:00.001+05:30

नये जौहरी नयी अदा वाले,
तौल कर भाव बताने वाले।

सब मिले हैं हमे ज़माने मे,
यार अहसान जताने वाले।

दिल खुदा का है यार का मेरे,
और अंदाज़ ज़माने वाले।

दिल की कालिख है आंख का काजल,
वो हैं आंखों से पिलाने वाले।

नाम कहने को है अभागा पर,
हैं सब अंदाज़ दिवानों वाले।

Language Digest - 5 (Articles/Editorials)

2007-02-11T08:12:00.001+05:30

This is the long promised article only edition.

This one comes from Pakistan, lamenting the bad condition of Madarsa education.

Pakistan again, this time a view in favor of the recent step of making English compulsory. Sounds very much like the recent argument of Prasad about English for Dalits.

Continuing on the common thread of Urdu, condition of Urdu press in India is not something to brag about. There is hardly a Urdu news paper that commands a voice at national level or even in a sufficiently big region. Moreover, it works both ways. While Urdu papers carry mostly Muslim centric perspective of problems, Hindi press lacks it to a large extent. Here is an attempt to start a Hindi paper with a Muslim perspective.

Not sure why this article is called "Hegemony of Hindi" and it is not even well written but it notes an interesting point about mother tongue reporting in census data. Read with a grain of salt.

Marathi or Kokani? As the article says ;

India is home to extraordinary diversity- cultural, religious, ethnic and linguistic. All such differences ought to be harmonized in a spirit of mutual accommodation rather than through coercive methods of homogenization which may only lead to agitations and revolt.

Here is an interesting reading of the role of English in the rise of Indian nationalism.

The half full glass of an optimist never fails to cheers me up. Here is Mrinal Pandey on the state of Hindi.

Lack of scientific and new vocabulary is a major problem plaguing Indian languages and in fact lot of other languages. This piece reiterates the importance of lexicographical work in a language and makes a case for its active pursuit in our universities.It is said that history is written by winners and languages are no exception.

Now for some heavy reading. Historical linguistics has developed as a discipline in last couple of centuries. One of the major accomplishments of the discipline has been a organization of languages in a genetic tree, showing their mutual relations. But this organization also makes strong claims about history in general and in particular about population diffusion in the yore. A. ananth Kumar questions this view.

And to end, here is a question. While a lot of ads appearing on TV are in Hindi and in other regional languages, why is the packaging often only in English? Why o why?

डरते हैं

2007-02-08T12:01:00.001+05:30

डरते हैं ना साकी को हम दिलदार बना लें,
मय को ना ग़म-ए-दिल का चारागार बना लें।

बस्ती से जो गुज़रा तो मुसाफ़िर ने की हसरत,
हम भी ठहर के अपना एक घरबार बना लें।

है चुक गया इंसान के दिल से खुदा का नूर,
कहने को रहे बुत चलो दो चार बना ले ।

दे दो सभी के हाथों मे कलमें-ओ-किताबें,
जुल्म-ओ-सितम से लडने का हथियार बना लें।

ता उम्र बावफ़ा रहीं हैं हमसे अभागा,
मायूसियों को ही न क्यों हम यार बना लें ।

Republic Day !

2007-01-28T12:30:00.000+05:30

What a wonderful way of celebrating Republic Day ! I just loved the concept and the wonderful entries. Surely my try out list is a little longer now. :-)

A happy and thoughtful Republic day to everybody. May you become a more responsible citizen in the year to come.

Why we need to look beyond English !

2007-01-14T15:33:00.001+05:30

Call centers and BPOs are the poster material for many people these days who firmly believe that English is the way to go forward. I have been trying to see how far their stand goes.

To me the whole hoopla about the necessity of learning English seems more like a rather short sighted view. the BPO and the call center industry primarily serves US and UK now a days. Together they constitute a very small part of the world population. Two of the major developing countries of the world, China and India still have only a rather small portion of their population using English for their daily transactions. The huge number of English speaking population that are reported are a little misleading in this respect.

Consider that India is estimated to have 35 crore English users. For example my father would qualify as a English user since he is able to use it on purpose but he is not comfortable using it in his daily life. Now consider that the developing economies of these countries are creating a huge middle class lead markets which is on the radar of all the major companies of the world. Tomorrow when customer support and call center services would be required for these markets, they will have to come in languages other than English. Reliance has customer support in various Indian languages already.

The current approach completely ignores the potential of the local market and demand for these services. In fact, even apart from local market, there are large parts of world where regional language services (for example Spanish) will open up new markets. Concentrating only on one language in the name of global language would be to loose out on a big opportunity.

I also see the current scenario as a huge opportunity for India and Indian people. For those who believe in looking towards US for inspiration, there is already plenty if they look closely. US is investing huge sums of money in language research and in encouraging students to take up foreign languages. Indians have the advantage of being at least bilingual by default. This is the chance to cash in on that default and expand our expertise to all the various languages and not just English. Already there is a huge market for the translation industry because companies need to translated huge amount of product related documentation in to various languages. EU which has 22 working languages generates a huge amount of translation work. It is an opportunity for not only persons with language skills but also language related technologies.

In a more broader perspective, a lot of digital revolution is still limited to a small part of the world. Now there are two future scenarios. Either it will spread out to all the parts or it will simply not be sustainable because as the world gets connected, the whole chain is only as strong as the weakest link. So let's be optimists and say that indeed the digital divide would be filled and that more and more people would be able to reap its benefits. Now again, we may argue that English is necessary for this to happen and become one of its allies, rooting for adoption of English as a global language or we may see this as a challenge on our part and make the technology more language neutral, make it available to people in the language which they understand best. This way we reach them fast since speed of technological development is always faster than the cultural changes. This way we generate less commotion, face less resistance and most important of all, we save the beautiful things that are languages.

Now that last statement may be lost on many people. Why is it important to save languages? For one rather scientific reason, study of various language and the relations among them gives us important clues about the evolution and spread of man kind on the planet. The huge diversity in various languages gives as an insight in to the human mind and how it works, how it has developed. But more importantly, a language carries with it whole cultures. One language gone is an important part of our heritage gone, wisdom of elders that distilled down the generations gone and one color of the colorful world gone.

Choice is ours and we have to make it now.

The Culture Shock III - Measure for Measure

2007-01-14T03:08:00.000+05:30

I hold you as a thing enskyed and sainted;
By your renouncement an immortal spirit,
And to be talked with in sincerity,
As with a saint.
Measure for Measure, 1. 4

USA remains one of the only 3 countries which do not use Metric System of measurement. For somebody coming in from a country that uses metric system, it can be a real pain in the ass. So temperatures are in Fahrenheit, distances are in miles, weights are in pounds and liquids in gallons and I am in trouble. So how do you decide how difficult would it be to walk home from a grocery store which is 1 mile away, carrying 4 pounds of potatoes and 1 gallon milk when the temperature is 60 degree Fahrenheit. I would rather walk and find out. Even now it is so easy to get lulled into the sense of closeness when suddenly a factor 1.6 pops up.

Now I don't have any pro or anti metric stand since I haven't found any huge benefits of one over another. I think it is a matter of getting used to it.
However not everybody shares my opinion and there are people here who see Metric system as an assault on their way of measuring, on their heritage ! For God's sake ! heritage? I would think that there would be better things to hold on to as heritage. Even in India I never heard anyone say that ser should be preserved as a weight measuring unit or kos as a distance measuring unit because they are part of our heritage !

As I see it, the issue is not about one thing being better then the other but about standardization. I don't think there is any country which exclusively uses Metric units. Units like beegha, gaj, tola are still prevalent in India. But having Metric system in public usages makes it easy for people to work smoothly wherever they go.

Common sense would say that US should see least resistance to Metric conversion owing to strong emphasis on science and technology (the moon mission was all in imperial units), a relatively new society with so much diversity which would negate any historical attachments and the large immigrant population who come here well versed in Metric system. But strange are the ways of man !

In fact I got reading about the Metrication efforts in other countries of the world. It seems almost unthinkable that even India converted to Metric system during 1956-1961. Before independence, there was very little or no use of Metric system in India. The conversion was relatively smooth since most of the population was illiterate at that time and so there was no resistance from them. One would usually think that education makes a person more open minded and rational. In this particular case, the situation seems to be completely at odds.

Another strange thing I have noticed here is that there don't seem to be any standard packing sizes, not even in terms of pound and gallons. The Garlic powder I bought yesterday is some 347 gm and some 12.25 oz. And there are all strange packing sizes like this on the shelves. Either I am missing something very basic here or it is yet another trick of the trade that makes price comparison all the more difficult.

Faces of Democracy - Czech Dreams with Stolen Eyes

2007-01-12T05:57:00.000+05:30

Many overdue posts lurk in the darkness while I sleep and dream the Czech Dream.

Journey of a nation from a communist past to Capitalistic future seen from the eyes of two cynics, I mean in a good way, the kind of cynics every society needs. How the people depraved for years become such a easy target for consumerism - that endless world of cheap deals, huge super stores and feel good experience and how the media plays a associate while claiming innocence. An exchange between the directors and ad agency guys who are a part of the whole game is very telling:

"Maybe you filmmakers lie to people, but we advertisers don't!"

However the film is a very clever one. Not because of the prank but how it pretends to hold up a mirror to a consumerist society but along the way slyly puts the partners in the game, the advertising agency, the media production companies, the market survey companies under scanner. It is them who are the real subject of the movie and the whole prank is just a distraction to catch them when they are most off guard. The camera trains at these people again and again probing their moral values and exposing how most of them exist in a denial of the dilemmas that are all around them, giving themselves shallow justifications for their choices.

This is the kind of movie that everybody in India really needs to see today.

However not with Stolen Eyes. This was a big let down in the whole festival, a movie that I left in between which is very rare for me. Ironically this was a very critically acclaimed film but it seemed such a shallow and superficial affair to me that it was difficult to understand all the praise it has been getting. Many scenes through out the movie looked more like a Nat Geo dramatic adaption then a movie. The historical background in which the movie is set is really saddening and will prove to be heart wrenching in good hands. In 1985, Bulgarian govt decided to rename all the Turk population of the country that has been living there for generations and remove all traces of their culture. It was a ethnic cleansing of horrifying measure but all the strong premise has been royally wasted in the movie. They have tried to do this love story set against this background and failed. The starting part of the movie is a visual treat however due to the beautiful country side and the colorful Turkish culture that it shows but there is little else but frustration of viewer as the movie progresses.

So watch Czech Dreams and open your eyes. I am sure you won't need Stolen Eyes after that :-).

Language Digest - 4 [News]

2007-01-07T06:00:00.000+05:30

This dose of LangDig is going to be a pretty big one, owing in part to my extended vacation and in part to the accumulating bits from every edition. I have tried to organize the clips in categories so that they are easy to follow. Some of these stories are now around 1 month old but better late then never ! Also it is broken in two parts, this one being news and the second one being of general articles.

Political:

Let us start by looking at the reactions to the Marathi being compulsory in all the schools. CBSE is not amused. IBN tries to carry out a debate over the recent spat of make-compulsory steps taken in Karnataka and Maharashtra and when Congress has done it, can Bala Saheb be far behind?

Taking a clue from the neighbors, Andhra Govt is considering making sign boards in Telugu compulsory. In a function organized to award Gidugu Smaraka Puraksaram-2006 to C Dharma Rao, who has done lot of work to bring up Telugu, Andhra Pradesh CM said that they will push harder to get classical status for Telugu. State assembly recently passed a resolution about this. On the other hand, Sanskrit lecturers are accusing the state intermediate education board of an attempt to wean away students from Sanskrit.

Among all this, Gujarat govt is introducing programs to improve the English skills of Gujaratis to give them an edge in job market. Also, there were reports that text books in Gujarat have many linguistic errors. That should be the first place to set the things right.

Demands for govt support for Bodo medium schools is being raised by Bodoland Territorial Council.

Upcoming resources:

Open universities are taking steps to provide education to prison inmates in their native languages. Bhojpuri and Rajasthani are being considered to be included in 8th schedule and a committee has recommended that all the 22 languages currently in 8th schedule, should get separate funds for their development in the 11th 5 year plan.

Following RBI guidelines, all public sector banks will now have to provide all the customer output in Hindi in addition to English.

Dayanidhi Maran envisages a parliament with Machine Translation technologies ! I am so glad :-).

BSNL has started providing SMS services in many local languages including Kannada.

Cultural:

A church in Hyderabad that speaks local languages !

The first International Literature Festival of India is happening.

A reference book about Romany, the Gypsy language, is making waves. This language originated in India but is largely extinct now.

A new age film called SMS 6260 is coming out in Feb, 2007. It is based around the SMS culture and has characters speaking upto 11 languages ! Also a Tamil Animation movie, Inimey Naangathaan is slated to be released late this month. It claims to be the first regional language animation movie.

Technical:

A new new portal for Oriya language, odisha.com has been launched which offers mail and search in Oriya language. Another company called guruji.com is working to bring out search for regional languages by developing keyboards for them. Talking of keyboards, HP Labs has been developing a gesture keyboard.

C-DAC is the nodal agency in India working to bring out freely available software tools in all Indian languages. Following up their recent release of software CDs in many languages, they have many plans ahead.

[To be Continued]

The cynic within me

2007-01-03T01:27:00.000+05:30

also wants to have a say, not because it rejoices at the new year but because it sees everybody else rejoicing !

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again !

-- The Who, "Won't get fooled again !"

Best wishes !

2007-01-01T14:43:00.000+05:30

- Today, tomorrow, next week, next year
- Somewhere a full stop.
- The fear of death
- Of a life again
- Of never waking up
- Of an endless wake
- Of things words don't know of
- Because we go to them in silence
- On the floor of reason
- The what ifs hang
- Protected from love
- walk we safe
- And we count the years
- One two and three
- longing for insecurity
- longing for no name
- craving for loosing the me
- Let this be the year
- Let this be the day
- Let this be the hour
- To you I wish
- Not conquest
- But surrender !

Have a magical and most wonderful year !

25 or no 25

2006-12-18T13:56:00.001+05:30

The cake has been cut, the Orkut messages are raining, phone has done its own share of ringing and I am writing a blog post. In few hours from now, I would complete my 25 years of existence.

Although 21 is the age at which you become adult in India for all practical purposes, 25 seem to be a landmark in its own right. So in Indian tradition, I am officially out of Brahmacharya part of my life and in US, I can now rent a car everywhere. Hardly sound like things to care for !

When we were young, we all dreamt of growing up. I think 25 is closest to the dream age to which every child wants to grow up. This is the point when you are supposed to have grown up and ready to take on the world. I feel like the life till now has been spend in a kind of preparation and now is the time to go ahead and do what you want. Irony is that in the last years of all the preparation you realize, you have taken the wrong road may be ! But as the Led Zeppelin said,

Yes there are two paths you can go by
but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on !

And so 25 or no 25, It doesn't matter. How long have you walked the road, doesn't matter. How many walk beside you, doesn't matter. Where does the road go, doesn't matter. There is always the time, there is always the chance and there is always the courage, to walk the road you want. Just look into your heart.

Somebody taught me a beautiful thing in this last year. Here it goes.

"There may be thousand reasons for not doing something but there is always one reason for doing it - because you want to !"

25 or no 25, Dream on !

Language Digest - 3

2006-12-16T22:07:00.000+05:30

Sorry for the long delay but somethings in life just cannot wait and semester end seems to be rather full of them. but back we are and here we go.

Madras HC sees little use for Tamil without proper infrastructure being in place. This is in responce to Govt's move to make Tamil as the court language.

In the education field, Kannada and Marathi are now compulsory in their respective states for 10th and 12th standard kids. It is not very clear is this is for state boards only or for ICSE and CBSE also. In Kashmir also, efforts are on to introduce Kashmiri in the private schools.

Urdu medium schools in Delhi are not able to find Urdu speaking Science and Maths teachers and so students are having problems.

Central Institute for English and Foreign Languages has been accorded University status. I hope now the research section on their website will come out of being "under construction".

After schools, it is sign boards in Karnataka.

The national association of the Deaf wants official status for Indian Sign Language.

Even the strong opponents of missionary activities will have to concede that their work in native languages has been phenomenal. The whole SIL and Ethnologue is the result of years of Christian missionary work in the field. The gospel for Asia is now broadcasting in 11 new languages. These guys know how to talk to a man, literally.

In news from the center, independent India is going to conduct its very first linguistic survey. The last one was 100 years back commissioned by the British.

Delhi cops brush up their English skills and learn foreign languages for coming Commonwealth games.

In technical news, C-DAC is launching its software tools package for 7 more languages, Webduniya content becomes available in 2 more languages and ByIndia launches search in 5 Indian languages.

There is more but I think I will end now with two items. First one about how mother tongues and love marriages are getting along and second about how Jharkhand is having problems with its linguistic diversity.

Gareebi me aata gila !

2006-12-15T05:53:00.000+05:30

Though it looks like there was no damage, it has left me feeling utterly insecure. Before entering any password I think twice what if he left a backdoor or Trojan or keylogger and would be back later to pick up all the goodies nicely stored in a file somewhere on my disk? Anybody having any ideas about detecting a Linux keylogger running, please get back to me.

The only good part is that I actually saw it happened and so was able to get in the damage control mode immediately. When we came here, we were told that computing environment here is extremely hostile and that any vulnerability will be exploited within a day of being exposed. My VNC server could survive may be 10 hours. A look at the /var/log/messages shows consistent attacks on ssh every 4-5 hours. Living in the famous parts of IP namespace has its own disadvantages.

And this happened when I was still trying to recuperate from the yesterday's misadventure with new Airtel call home service. I tried to register at their website and they did a Air Deccan to me i.e. charged my account but said that there had been an error ! I don't mind this very much what with the huge traffic and unreliable network connections but what annoyed me was that the 24x7 phone number advertised boldly on the website is *not working*. And no replies whatsoever from the customer care email address also.

And as a follow up, I discovered that out of the two solutions to a problem in a final on Tuesday, the one I chose to pen down is the wrong one ! I thought the other one was elegant but not necessary but turns out that was the right one. Should I say karela vo bhi neem chada or Sone pe suhaga or may be icing on the cake !

Sometimes it is just too much fun !

Lucknow University crackdown

2006-12-14T21:29:00.000+05:30

There are several interesting news stories from back home today, some of them good, some of them bad and depressing.

The good news comes from my home town Lucknow. Lucknow University (LU) has long been a den of criminals of all kind of hues. There are student leaders there who are always in the jail. Due to the strong backing of the political parties, administration is hardly able to do anything. LU has gone down steadily in the quality of education. Now the current VC of LU has decided to take the bull by the horns. He has closed the university sine die and has suspended around 135 students with criminal records. This despite the hoopla in the assembly against him. No wonder a majority of the suspended students belong to SP, the ruling party and that head of SP, Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav was the most vocal critic of the VC, Dr. R P Singh. Anyone who knows the situation in LU would have to admire the courage required to do such a thing. You can read about it here, here and here .

Specially amusing is the old rant of politicians this time coming out from Mr. Yadav bemoaning the death of democracy. I have two comments. One is that politicians have become a self appointed guardian of democracy in the country. Anything against their wishes happens and it goes against democracy. Second is I fail to understand why University has to be a model of democracy? I agree that being socially aware is good for students and that many of the future leaders emerge from the student politics but essentially universities or any other institutions can only be a sandbox democracy, a demonstration system. And these setups will have to play second fiddle to the primary function of an education institute and that is providing education. They can play a important role in the education but should never be allowed to overtake it. This theme has come up in IITK also in the past and I have said it there also. The assumption that the institute should follow the democratic principles in its dealings with students has to be a qualified one. So just saying that AIIMS director has become a dictator or LU's VC has become a dictator is not enough. A dictator may very well be what the place needs right now !

Also I can see the recent AIIMS fiasco coming into play somewhere in the background. If we set aside the reservation issue for time being, the fight there was essentially between a academician and a politician, both had their own agenda and either may be right and wrong, I am not gunning for anybody here. But the the way it unfolded, it demonstrated that it is possible to take on politicians and stick to your stand even if the politician happens to be a cabinet minister at the center and in fact a very well connected one. The message coming out was very clear, if you have a problem with political interference, go ahead and fight it and you have a reasonable chance of success. I sincerely hope that this message becomes even strong after LU incident and more heads of our beleaguered university system stand up to face the politics. What is needed is ample media coverage because the dangers in this process are very real and they would need all the cover they can get !

Good Luck Dr. Singh ! Even if you go down fighting, you have shown that fighting is still an option !

Welcome back?

2006-12-14T00:19:00.000+05:30

Well, I must admit that I am given to the vice of over-dramatization but I take care to always have a premise !

So the question is, are you at a new blog or are you at the old blog? Should I welcome you or should I welcome you back? Is it "nayi botle me puraani sharab" ya "puraani botel me nayi sharab"? Nevermind as Kurt said, we have labels now and we will be putting them over everywhere so that nobody gets lost in this basket case ever again. But till that is done, you are advised to tread cautiously and heed to what I said in the first paragraph. I am given to over-dramatizations !

The track will be back in a short while !

Before change !

2006-12-10T08:29:00.000+05:30

This post is the last one on this blog. Blogspot has been a pretty good host but now it goes to where it belongs, hall of fame.

Here comes Blogger 2, just in time for the new year party with all the new goodies ! Let's party !!

Faces of Democracy II - Your name is Justine

2006-12-03T02:18:00.000+05:30

"Where is love? Where are dreams? Where is the bloody justice?"

These are tough questions, questions which lurk just around the corner but we avoid asking them. Because facing them means questioning the most basic assumptions of our lives and then everything threatens to just fall apart. Not something we can afford to. Right?

But what do you do when life forces you to ask these questions and refuses to answer? This is the point in the life of Mariola when we leave her at the end of the movie. The life has turned a full circle for her, she is back in her familiar surroundings, among friends and well wishers but what has changed is her. She is no longer the little princess who just wanted to be happy. The movie is the story of how that happens, how the psych of a simple polish girl is damaged beyond repair, how the heart is hurt beyond healing. A story that is not unique to Mariola but to thousands of girls all over the world who are pushed into flesh trade by those very hands whom they choose to trust.

The pattern is repeated all very often. A girl embarks on a journey with his lover/boyfriend/well wisher and ends up in flesh trade. But this seemingly one line story contains inside it a frightening journey from that first moment in which the whole world suddenly collapses to the moment when she finally "gives in". That is the journey that is chronicled in "You name is Justine" , Justine being a possible allusion to sade. It records the violence in enough detail to shock you but stops before becoming too gory.

But the main challenge in such an effort is to bring out the psychological violence, the destruction that is happening inside victim's mind. The movie succeeds in that but there is definitely room for improvement. Some scenes really stand out, like when Meriola realized what is happening to her and when she just sits near a small opening in the apartment talking all by herself to the people traveling by train passing underneath. The movie starts in a ham factory showing how a pig is pickup, dazed, killed and converted to ham. This is a very strong allegory to everything that happens in the movie afterwards, that small sequence in the first 2-3 min is played out in its full gory details in next 90 min albeit with human victim this time.

Before the main movie they showed a short film from Poland that was an entry in the short film competition organized along with the film fest and I was really amazed by the quality of cinematography and the wonderful narrative structure in a small 5 min short ! I hope it wins something :-)

Language Digest - 2

2006-12-01T13:24:00.000+05:30

Let us start by 3 statements all coming from different conflict zones, typical of the role languages play in such scenarios. Manipur, Nepal and Kashmir.

Taking forward the theme of conflict, here are some other effects of language antagonism: Asaam. In his new book, Subramanian Swamy asks Hindu's to vow to learn Sanskrit. Look towards the end of the review.

And contrary to what I said, here is this blog post from Bangalore in which police refuses to help since the complainer was not able to speak Kannada.

To bring back some cheer, efforts to promote languages: Bhutan and Konkani

UT Austin launches Hindi-Urdu program and Cambridge recently closed its Sanskrit Dept. But academicians speak up for Sanskrit.

Sindhi Language is doing fine and so is Dakhani in India.

In Hindi Literature, translations are in vogue these days.

On technology side, Tegic released predictive text for Hindi.

To end, here is Pratap Bhanu Mehta on lessons from 1956 linguistic reorganization of states.