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अंधश्रद्धा को बताया प्यार उसने, खेल जादू का दिखाया यार उसने। चाँद को देखा तभी एक कौर निगला, कर लिया यूँ उम्र का व्यापार उसने। साथ में भूखा रहा वो आदमी कल, नारी जाति का किया उद्धार उसने। वो बहू अच्छी रही होगी 'अभागा', सह लिया चुप रूढ़ियों का भार उसने।

Sometime back on Twitter, in the course of a discussion on translations, someone mentioned that translations of foreign authors seem to find more favor with Indian readers as compared to translation of Indian authors from Indian languages. While many love writers like Orhan Pamuk (Turkish), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish), not the same favor is accorded to Indian writers. There is a certain disinterest towards them. As is the wont of every Twitter discussion, someone soon mentioned "colonized minds" and that was that. I'm not sure about the validity of original assertion, there are too many unverified assumptions here. How popular is Orphan Pamuk in India after all? But this discussion got me thinking about my own experience of reading translations. Do I have such a preference? I think I do. Despite the multitude of languages, there is an underlying cultural continuity across India. Irrespective of the language of the story, if it is set in India, if it is about Ind...

"Old Kannada inscription dated 981 CE in Vindyagiri hill at Shravanabelagola"  Based on my efforts to learn Kannada, I have come to realize that there is a disconnect between the resources available and resources required for learning the language. While there is a steady stream of apps to help Kannada learners, they all seem to be based on the same basic pattern which I believe is not useful. When learning Kannada, a speaker of another Indian language is presented with two difficulties. One is the language and other is the script. In the absence of reading, the sole source of language data being absorbed is spoken. With spoken data, the learner can neither control the speed of the incoming data nor can he reliably repeat it. This severely slows down the vocabulary acquisition process. Without knowing the script, he cannot read the newspaper which is a good cheap source of plenty of reading material. Reading the newspaper in a language also provides a good sense of ...

I am not a registered voter in Bangalore. There. I said it. I am sitting here diddling my thumb as others around me go and elect their government. In the 14 years since I qualified as a voter, I have voted once. As it happens, shortly before I turned 18, I left home and have lived in hostels, other cities, other countries ever since, never remaining in one place for more than 4 years. Being politically aware at the national and state level but mostly feeling as an outsider to the proceedings in immediate vicinity. I voted in the last LS elections because I happened to be in Lucknow on the election day. In 2009, When I looked up the candidates I had to choose between, I was stuck. For me, Lucknow meant Vajpayee, someone I had come to admire. Given that he was a top level leader, his views on variety of issues were well known. But by 2009, he was no longer around. As his nominee, we had Lal ji Tandon from BJP - someone I had never liked. Congress had Rita Bahuguna in fray. Hardl...

पोस्टर छपवाने पड़ते हैं, विज्ञापन देने होते हैं, रैलियां सैकड़ों लगती हैं, गठबंधन करने पड़ते हैं. जनतंत्र के सागर में मित्रों, कुछ लहरें सहसा उठती हैं, बाक़ी उठवानी पड़ती हैं. कुछ बात भूलनी पड़ती हैं, कुछ अजब करिश्मे होते हैं, अपराध मुक्त भारत के लिए, अपराधी चुनने पड़ते हैं. जनतंत्र के मेले में मित्रों, कुछ नाच नचाते बन्दर को, कुछ बन्दर-नाच नचाते हैं. कभी चाय बेचनी पड़ती है, इंटरव्यू देने पड़ते हैं, जब लोग कुर्सियां ना छोड़ें, तो धक्के देने पड़ते हैं. जनतंत्र की होली में मित्रों, कई रंग दिखाने पड़ते हैं, कई रंग बदलने पड़ते हैं.

Almost 10 years ago I started this blog. At 273 posts, it amounts to 1 post every 2 weeks. I can't think of any other habit that survived that long with that consistency. Of course, just like all statistics, this hides more than it reveals. For the past 3 years, I have written 7, 7, and 5 posts respectively. I don't know why I am writing this post. Not here to promise another flurry of activity. This is not the last ditch effort to save a dying relationship. It is not meant to be a epithet for something that has been lost. This is me spending some time with an old friend where the friendship has become such a part of you that gaps in time can be bridged at will. Threads can be picked up wherever they were left. And new yarns can be weaved effortlessly. Welcome 2014. Hope we will have a good time.

Let me confess something. While it has been years since Pothi.com has been selling ebooks and it has been years since I have been talking and thinking about ebooks, it is only recently that I read a complete book on a dedicated reading device. The book was Lean Analytics published by O'Reilly Media. But this is not a review of that book. This post is about what it felt like reading a fairly long book on an e-reader. I read part of it on Kindle and part of it on Nook touch. The first thing I noticed was that e-readers these days are very good and you don't miss the paper version all that much. I have said this to many people who express doubts about e-readers - Try one out for 1-2 days and do some serious reading on it. I bet a lot of people would change their mind one they try out a device. The key is to not see it as a replacement of paper books - the only way they are represented in most media coverage. Instead take them up as a device on their own and see if you like th...

छोड़ कर शाख क्यों सड़कों पे चले आते हैं, फूल मासूम हैं, नाहक ही सज़ा पाते हैं। स्याह पड़ती हुई इस शहर की बेनूर शकल, रंग दो पल को झलकते हैं, गुज़र जाते हैं। भागते दौड़ते इस शहर के कुछ वाशिंदे, साल भर फरवरी की याद में बिताते हैं। फूल इंसान की उम्मीद के सितारे हैं, आँख उठती है दुआ में, तो नज़र आते हैं। शहर के फूल अभागा बड़ी किस्मत वाले, ठोकरों से नहीं, कारों से कुचले जाते हैं।

One of the mantras of entrepreneurship is to build something that people want. The road to success is lined with geeks who dreamt of beautiful solutions existing in perfect worlds for problems that no one seemed to have. Lean startup formalizes this in terms of customer development. The aim is to identify a customer who is willing to pay you money today for what you can deliver tomorrow. Recently there was an article in NYT about how the American fast food industry  has filled people's plates with more salt, sugar and fats in an effort to sell more junk food. Many of the executives, when confronted with questions about these practices, defended themselves on the pretext that they were only giving people what they wanted. If they do not give it to them, someone else will. Why is it that these executives seem to be doing something wrong (or bad if wrong sounds too strong)? They were merely following the oft repeated advice for building a successful business. In fact, making food...

जब इस बार मिलें हम तुम, कुछ अलग सा मुझको पाओ तो, हाथ पकड़ लूं मैं बढ कर, तुम मुझसे शर्मा जाओ तो? नींद नही आये पर सपनो से बोझिल होकर पलकें, मुंद जाएँ और तुम काँधे पर सर रख कर सो जाओ तो? गर साथ हो बस दो पल का और फिर जीवन भर का इंतज़ार, दो पल न बीतें कभी, समय बस वहीं कहीं रुक जाए तो? जो कहना चाहें दोनो कुछ पर बात जुबां पर ना आये, और देख हमारी दुविधा चन्दा बादल में छुप जाए तो? कभी आँख तेरी गर भर आये और मेघदूत बन कर बादल, तेरी आँखों के मोती मेरे आँगन बिखरा जाए तो?

Over at HSI , Vijay Anand of Startup Centre and Proto.in fame, posted some excellent thoughts about the wannabe entrepreneurs who are looking for technical co-founders: A Trademark Skillset (and I am reiterating) is that one thing you are absolutely known for - it might be people skills; to be able to bring people together around a problem, form a solution and build an enterprise around it, it might be more specific around technology, or design, or fundraising (sic), or sales / business development - but it has to be one quality that you have, that the entire organization (sic) can bet on.  You should read the full post on HSI .

There has been a lot of talk in the Indian media recently about the lack of profitability of major Indian e-commerce players. Many of them are also trying out different strategies to manage finances while maintaining growth. While Flipkart has been tweaking discounts and raising limits for free shipping (a move that was quickly followed by almost everyone), IndiaPlaza has excused itself out of the discount race by saying that they want to be the " only money making e-commerce company " out of the top 3-4 players and not the biggest. However HomeShop18 seems have sensed an opportunity here and has put almost the entire books category on unprecedented discounts! I was hard pressed to find any title that has less then 29-30% discount. Most of the titles are as highly discounted as 35-40%. This includes even the titles which they might be importing from outside. In all my searching, I came across one title which was at 10%. This is insane! And if this was not enough, they have...

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 di...

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.

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 appr...

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 ...

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!

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 t...

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 s...

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 he...