Saket Jamkar's Weblog

2010-08-18T19:31:00.001-07:00

New England Roots, Indian Fruits

Boston has been my home for the last 2 years and I've learnt a lot about America during my time here. One of my favorite pastimes is making a note of all the historical connections between India and America and in this post, I'm going to try to jot down a few I can remember.

Gandhiji's many independence movements are the stuff of history books every Indian kid is familiar with. Civil disobedience, Quit India... A fact omitted from the textbooks is the inspiration behind civil disobedience. The name comes from a work by Henry David Thoreau who practiced his civil disobedience near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was an early practitioner of the environment-friendliness movement and decided to live off the land taking as little as possible from Mother Nature or the government. He built a cottage near Walden pond in Concord to stay away from other residents of Concord. Unfortunately the tax collector thought he owed Uncle Sam money and Thoreau protested by refusing to pay taxes. Gandhiji, the disciple clearly outdid the master Thoreau in this instance... Thoreau's civil disobedience seems like a storm in a teacup when compared to Gandhiji's campaigns. I find this an interesting connection given that later in American history Martin Luther King drew inspiration for the Civil Rights movement from Gandhiji.

Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts

A British Raj character one reads about prominently in textbooks is Lord Cornwallis, appointed the Governer-General of India by the East India Company in 1786. Lord Cornwallis was also involved in the Anglo-Mysore wars between the British and Tipu Sultan. Turns out Lord Cornwallis in a past life was also one of the major players in the American War of Independence and was the general who surrendered to the American-French forces after a defeat in the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. Clearly Cornwallis's failures in America didn't disqualify him from the top job in British India. All the same I'm happy to report that there are Indian connections to the American Revolution besides the tea at the Boston tea party.

Lord Cornwallis surrenders after the Battle of Yorktown

Where would you say Mowgli was conjured? The Jungle Books are books one would instantly associate with the jungles of India. Even the names of the characters like Bagheera, Kaa and Mowgli have an Indian ring to them. I was surprised to find out that Kipling wrote them when he stayed at his mansion "Naulakha" in Brattleboro, Vermont about 3 hours north of Boston. The Times reported this one last year and notes that one of my favorite authors, Arthur Conan Doyle visited Kipling in Vermont.

Kipling's Naulakha mansion in Vermont

2010-06-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

iPhone4?

10:28AM " Now I'd like to talk about the iPhone."

It was a scene straight out of 1980's India. Instead of 5 Indians gathering around a small radio with commentary of an India-Pakistan cricket game at lunch time, it was a group of my coworker friends gathered around V reading out the live Engadget feed on his iPad. Even passers-by were curiously peeking over V's shoulders to check out pictures of Steve Jobs displaying a picture of another feature of the iPhone. The launch of the new iPhone had all of geek-dom engrossed today and what luck it was lunch time in Boston. Now that's what I call genius... getting consumers primed to watch a 2 hour commercial of your company's wares.

Completely mesmerized I was willing to drive to the nearest Apple store to buy one on my way back home. Turns out instant gratification was not the order of the day today. Thankfully better sense may have prevailed as well. Do I really need a better screen than my 1st generation iPhone? The 5 MP camera with a flash would be a nice to have, but the video chat ability really is meaningless right now. Good-looking people might like the idea of video-chat I guess. And the deaf too.

So what's my conclusion? I have no idea. The price is not as prohibitive as when the first iPhone came out. $15 per month for the cheapest data-plan with AT&T could actually save me money. I did manage to damage my existing iPhone, so it would be nice to have one in pristine condition. I could still make an impulse buy, but honestly it's not much of a step up.

2010-04-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

The Mayo Clinic Diet

As I am fast approaching the big 3 and 0, I have decided to dedicate my last few weeks of relative youth on this planet to a completely selfish cause. I am going to try to lose weight. They say this gets harder with age and clearly my impending uncle-dom will not help matters. I was inspired by the Mayo Clinic Diet. One of their ideas is to adopt 5 good habits and abandon 5 bad habits. Full disclosure... I have not read this book. I have only read its reviews online. Hopefully if none of you fellow human beings pick it up from my local public library before I do, I can change that last line. : )

One of my thoughts is to blog about it, so that my progress will be available for anyone to peruse and track. That may put some shame into play so that I don't chicken out of a 2 week goal. Starting to sound like a lot of fun, huh? ; )

Hopefully one in three posts will describe a good habit I am adopting at least for the next 2-3 weeks. Habit 1: Go natural. This habit is inspired by Michael Pollan's writing about food. One of Mr Pollan's rules is to not eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't be able to recognize. Well so in short all your new-fangled victuals are out... no Splenda, no processed foods, so no Lean Cuisine, no burgers, no chips, no French fries, no sugar. In short if you need to snack, you're stuck to fruits, vegetables or nuts. I am going to make a couple of exceptions here. Fat-free milk is allowed, even though all 4 of my great-grandmothers would call it water. Restaurant food is allowed so long as I stick to the principle and eat minimally processed stuff... ie salad, grilled fish or vegetables, although my forebears clearly would be displeased at my non-vegetarian tendencies.

Another note... I am not very overweight. The last time I weighed myself I was about 168 pounds. I'll be happy if I can achieve 160 pounds. I'd like to reduce whatever central obesity my Indian genes predispose me to.

Dinner today: Spinach, carrots, almonds and walnuts with lemon juice as dressing.

2010-02-27T18:15:00.000-08:00

Danny Boyle's "Millions"

I watched Danny Boyle's excellent movie "Millions" on this lazy Saturday. Mr Boyle's, multi-Oscar winner "Slumdog Millionaire" was not my favourite movie by many a mile. What I disliked most about it, is that it gave people a way to stereotype Indians and use the word "slumdog" for any Indian, even someone like myself who grew up in comfortable circumstances with physician parents in India.

Anyways "Millions" is about two brothers, 7-year-old Damian and his elder brother Anthony, who have lost their mother recently. Damian lands up with a bag full of pounds while playing close to a train line, shortly before a fictitious currency switch from pounds to euros in the UK. Damian's brother, Anthony, is a natural Wall-Street banker in the making and is completely obsessed by the money and ways to make it grow. He says, "If you tell the government they will take forty percent of it. FORTY PERCENT! Do you know how much that is? That's nearly ALL of it." On the opposite end of the spectrum, Damian considers the money a gift from God, and decides to emulate the many saints he day-dreams about. I love the parts where Damian roams the streets asking people "Are you poor?" before he takes them to a Pizza Hut for lunch or donates a wad of cash.

Surprisingly there is much that is similar between "Millions" and "Slumdog Millionaire". Trains, children, brothers, "Who wants to be a millionaire", gangsters, serendipitous change of circumstances, but "Millions" also has a simple message. Money is something I am still developing the right attitude about... what's the right balance between stingy and profligate? How much greed is bad? How much of your money should you donate? Greed is something that drives so much of the world around us. We live on a planet where the price of an hour of labour varies so widely based on where you do it, and where any moneyed interest will struggle to the ends of the earth for a gain regardless of the human or environmental costs. Money at times creates more trouble than it is worth.

2009-12-19T22:31:00.000-08:00

A Trip to Puerto Rico

Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492 and mistook it for India. About 500 years later 2 Indians went to Puerto Rico and can understand why Columbus could have been mistaken. Some of the obvious facts which were probably true in Columbus's days... Temperatures in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, average about 84 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. The surrounding areas have forests with basaltic rock formations quite like the Konkan coast. The Arawaks were probably brown-skinned too, although today most natives probably have some Spanish blood in their veins. Chillies may have originated on Hispaniola, so that takes care of some of that spice angle. And if you tried that Puerto Rican chicken stew, I bet it would remind you of a sort of curry... Even today's San Juan looks like a hybrid of Goa, Vashi and Prabhat Road melded into one city.

Why Puerto Rico you ask? Well blame it on our American visas. Leaving the country would mean that we need to get our renewed H visas stamped. Puerto Rico offered an escape to another country within American borders. Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States and was conquered by the US sometime in the early 20th century. An upshot is that our cellphones worked. Everything is priced in dollars avoiding the hassle of converting either physically or mentally. You can find the same restaurant chains as continental US on days you don't feel too adventurous. They also have interstates, although you better know enough Spanish to figure out which lane is closing for repairs ("izquierda" for left and "recha" for right) and which lane to use in case you don't have the exact change at the toll plaza. (If you do need to learn some Spanish, I highly recommend the BBC's Mi Vida Loca)

In addition there is tonnes to do. Old San Juan with its beautiful colorful houses, cobbled streets and 400 year old forts offers a trip to another era. El Morro, a fort whose construction started in 1539, feels as if it were right out of scenes of Pirates of the Caribbean. We also enjoyed a few sunsets on the Atlantic, just wading through the waters and the golden sands. We also made a day-trip to El Yunque, the only rain-forest in the US Forest Service's area of operation. On our final day on the island we went to Arecibo Observatory, home to the world's largest single-dish radio telescope. Arecibo was featured in the movies Contact and Goldeneye. If you are in San Juan, don't miss the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. I was pleasantly surprised that so much great art could emerge from a small island territory. Also don't miss the Museum's rock garden tribute to Monet and Giverny, replete with a pond with waterlillies and a bridge.

2009-11-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

Forbes Richest Indians

Ask an ordinary Puneite, who the richest person in Pune could be and I think you'd hear the names Chitale (of the bakarwadi fame) or Kirloskars (of the diesel engine fame). The truth is neither of them figure in the Forbes list of the 100 richest Indians. There are definitely a few surprises...

Mumbai tops the list in terms of the number of people as expected. The real surprise for me was that one of the 2 Marathi names on the list, (#51) Virendra Mhaiskar actually runs the company that operates the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. Crazy! It makes me wonder if politicians are unofficially some of the richest people in the country but just aren't listed here because all their money is stashed in the Swiss banks.

The richest person in Pune is Cyrus Poonawalla of the Serum Institute and the stud farms. A very long time ago, I studied at the Bishop's school. This was from Kindergarten to class second, and one of my classmates was actually Mr Poonawalla's son. I don't remember a whole lot from those days but I do remember that his son would have his name embroidered on his shirt and that his lunch was decidedly more lavish than other ordinary mortals like self, wish servants to set up a table and serve him from a pretty tall box everyday. Eventually we moved to the other side of the city so I started attending Loyola High School. There were probably a lot of rich kids there including sons of prominent builders, companies like Finolex and car dealers.

Anyways here's a link to the list of richest people in Pune

2009-04-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote this post roughly 4 years ago, charting my personal computing evolution. I have now been a professional computer engineer for the last 4 years, and I have 2 degrees in the field. I help design graphics chips for a leading semiconductor technology firm. It seems like an unlikely end for a kid who used to wonder how the various chips on a motherboard worked. I used to think that someday if I become really smart I'll know exactly what all these chips do, and what the numbers on them mean. I could have never predicted that I would end up here 20 years ago. I still don't understand what these chips do btw. ;)

Somehow it feels strange to think that computers and I came of age at roughly the same time... my height increased as processor speeds increased. What's even more uncanny is that processor speeds stopped increasing, roughly when my own stature stopped growing. :)

Computers consume my entire day now. I sit in front of one for most of my waking hours... if I am not at work on Linux/Windows machines, I am at home playing on my notebook. I bought three computers in the last 7 years... the first was a Dell Inspiron 8600, the second a Macbook, and the third a Dell XPS. My iPhone is full-featured to the extent that it would outdo the desktop machine we bought 10 years ago. What's more now is that computers are ubiquitous... the Wii console, the DVD player, my iPhone, my LCD TV, my car all have some semiconductor chips in them. What will the world look like 20 years from now?

2009-04-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

About life, the universe and computing

If you have heard/read/seen the H2G2 series, you'll love this speech by Douglas Adams on Youtube. I have to confess that much as I'd like to be one of the people who have read the H2G2 series, I suffer from a severe case of attention deficit disorder. I am very rarely (read once in 10 years) able to sustain my interest in a book long enough to read it cover to cover. It is a shame really, because I miss out on a lot of brilliant thoughts that people have had over the ages, unless someone has distilled them into TV shows, radio shows or movies. It is a debilitating foible when it comes to examinations... As an engineering student I always had trouble completely reading chapters, with the effect that if something you skipped appeared in the university exams, you were done for. Anyways I survived... I used to do two passes at chapters, one from the front and another from the back, so the rough center of the chapters were my Waterloo.

Anyways the Adams speech makes you realize how gifted he was. He travelled very widely (mentions trips to Madagascar, China & Galapagos in an hour), he was able to see the humor in everything, and he is able to connect history, biology, astronomy, computing and many other sciences. And to top it he was able to use all his skills to weave a fantasy world that was tremendously funny. It is a pity that he died at age 49...

Somehow I started thinking about things I read in the past week. So in the 1980s people made microprocessors by drawing large schematics that defined every gate in these processors. In time people realized that we could utilize computers to design more complex computers, and a new field called Computer Aided Design (CAD) took birth. Moore's law allowed us to quickly increase the complexity of these machines exponentially for the last 3 decades. But an essential feature of the computing world was our ability to use the fruits of our past efforts to build ever more complex devices. In a sense it relates to the statement Newton is said to have made on his deathbed, "If I have seen further, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." With Moore's law each new generation of humans stands on the shoulders of the last, forming a Totem Pole of sorts to see further. In a way we are all standing on the shoulders of Newton, Einstein, Shockley, Moore, Moresby and others...

2009-04-02T22:25:00.001-07:00

I'm a PC again! : An ode to my new Dell XPS

A few months ago I switched to a Mac. At the time I felt like I was moving up in life... I indulged in Microsoft hate-speech, I loved the Mac vs PC commercials. My Mac was a bottom of the line 13 inch Macbook, bought on a student discount with an iPod Touch for $999. For a few days I was raving at how sleek it looked (and its charger looked and its packaging looked), and appreciated how Apple spent so much time and attention on making things really pretty. But that soon wears off... When it came to doing office work, the Mac is a complete pain. I work on chip design and connecting to remote Windows & Linux machines at the office is something I do very frequently. Also some people may be able to get by without the right & middle mouse buttons, but I truly can't. Carrying an external mouse is really cumbersome if you're watching TV on a couch. Quite honestly not supporting some of the very basic things we all assume on a PC is not something I want to compromise on. Home, End, Page Up, Page Down buttons also have two-key short cuts on a Mac... but why do I need to use two hands to do that?!

My experience with a PC was with a Dell Inspiron 8600 that I bought when I was in grad school for $1400 about 6 years ago. I never bought a new machine because it just worked fine. I replaced the keypad myself and also the battery once. My impression about Windows Vista was really negative, based not just on the reports I saw in the media but also based on first-hand impressions from my friends.

Today I've been playing on my Dell XPS M1530 all evening and I truly love it. I spent about $1250 on it:

- TV Tuner Card : Amazing! It works so well. It caught all the digital TV stations on a tiny antenna and now I can even record Jeopardy, or Leno, or Charlie Rose. What's more I can now watch TV in the kitchen or in the bedroom? And Media Center also allows you to watch TV shows or movie trailers synced from the Web.

- Biometrics : Logging in with my fingerprint... Now arguably I don't know if my wife can cheat the system yet, but so far I like being able to use my fingerprint instead of typing.

- IE 8 : Accelerators... yeah I know Firefox had all this already but IE8s text rendering is so much better.

- Gadgets : Amazing superb! Just what the doctor ordered. I wonder whether third-party gadgets are allowed.

- The Design : Black and Metal design... this PC looks really sleek! The touch-sensitive keys are great too.

All in all, I love this machine. It even has an NVIDIA GPU that I worked on. I know it only gets used when Aero is ON and when I am watching DVDs for most parts, but hopefully someday I could code using CUDA on this baby. Great job all you engineers! :)

2008-12-14T13:31:00.001-08:00

Pictures from Home in Billerica

Here are some pictures from our place in Billerica. Billerica is a suburb of Boston, around 30 minutes from the heart of Boston. We moved here 5 months ago. As such apartments give you a blank white canvas, on which to paint with your furniture. Most of ours is the furniture we acquired in the Bay Area, from IKEA of course. One of the pictures of Sai is from Thanksgiving. This was our first Thanksgiving together, and we kept it non-alcoholic (that's a bottle of Martenelli's Apple Cider) and vegetarian (veggie pasta) too.

2008-11-09T15:00:00.000-08:00

Postcards from Boston : The Freedom Trail

I moved to Billerica 3 months ago, but the general busy-ness of life prevented me from doing the touristy things in Boston until today. So I headed downtown armed with my iPhone to take walk down the Freedom Trail. Billerica is a 30 minute drive from Boston. First stop, the Boston Common. This 50 acre park is the oldest in the country.

Next the Massachusetts State House. I don't remember if I saw this on Ally McBeal a long time ago.

The Freedom Trail is marked with red bricks or red paint and it is easy to follow it, unless you are too distracted with all the sights and sounds. Next I stopped at the site of the old Boston Latin school (the oldest public school in the country from 1635) where Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Sam Adams went to school. Here is a picture of the Ben Franklin statue outside the school:

Do you know where the Boston Tea Party started? The next monument takes you to something everyone remembers from the history books. The Old South Meeting Place.

Next a statue of Sam Adams outside Faneuil Hall, which hosted the first town hall meeting in the country.... In Boston all things are about being first, the oldest and other superlatives.

One word of advice on trekking the Freedom Trail. Be sure to wear your most comfortable shoes. I learnt this lesson the hard way today... Still nursing some shoe bites from the oldest parts of America. I headed to North End next. This is the Italian section of town, and it is lined with trattorias and stores. Eventually you reach the Old North Church and this beautiful statue of Paul Revere. Paul Revere was the important messenger who warned the freedom fighters about the impending British attack in April 19th, 1775.

If you are ever in the Boston area, give me a call. We could explore the Freedom Trail again. :) Next time I am planning to visit the Paul Revere House, among the oldest houses in the country.

2008-11-04T22:24:00.000-08:00

"That One" won that!

Simply amazing! I still had my doubts 24 hours ago, about how this election would shape up. I won't be cynical about the world any more. America has chosen a truly inspiring leader and his acceptance speech rivals some of the best I have read to date. I feel like I have found a role-model in Obama today.

I don't really feel sorry for John McCain. He didn't run an honorable campaign, and surprisingly the Truth did succeed. If John McCain chose to emulate the George Bush he met in the 2000 primaries, he really chose unwisely. Sad for him that he was beaten by the worst and the best that America has in the last 8 years.

2008-10-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

Everyday fractals

I am sure you have heard of fractals. It is a structure in which a part looks like the whole. It relies on creating structures with repeating patterns. Did you know that we rely on fractals for one major application everyday in our lives? Which application uses fractals?

I found out after watching Nova tonight that cellphone antennas are called fractal antennas because they use this property of self-similarity. (The image above is an example of a fractal antenna) So if you were wondering how the cellphone makers managed to make antennas so small that they fit inside your pocket, fractals are the answer. In order to achieve a high surface area in a small space, they decided to use this property of self-similarity to achieve it.

Beautiful and useful! Do watch NOVA for the many other examples.

2008-10-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

Talking Shop : For fellow silicon minions

I don't usually talk shop in this space. But today I landed upon two excellent blogs about related to ASIC Design and I wanted to share them here.

Adventures in ASIC Digital Design - Great site. I loved the challenges set by Nir Dahan, tackling puzzles one usually sees on ASIC Design interviews. One-hot detectors and divide-by-3 counters and so on. Nir definitely knows his stuff and is more than willing to share his solutions, while keeping an open mind to better solutions. Highly recommended.

Low-Power Blog : Godwin who works for Synopsys on low-power related EDA tools writes this blog. EDA vendors are the people to talk to about general trends, because they probably talk to the most number of digital designers across various companies.

2008-10-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

My only solace

If all that financial bad news is getting you down, or if that election smearing and lying by the Republican party is causing you heart-burn. Worry not! I have one source of pure pleasure during my time on the computer. Comics... Funny how one starts out reading only the comics as a kid, and now as a grown-up I end up reading only comics. The reasons for not reading the rest of the newspaper are different though. As a child you don't understand it good or bad.. As a grown-up you understand it but wish you didn't. :)

So partake in some comics here and here, and relax! As they say, "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping!"

2008-10-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

To the moon!

India launched its first unmanned probe to the moon successfully today. I feel proud (almost some of that jaajwalya variety from my beloved Pune). There have been questions about whether we can afford to send a probe to the moon. I feel we cannot afford not sending one. I could give numerous reasons for saying so. Clearly it has been a publicity success, with all the major news organizations of the world taking note. There were emails in the desi e-group at the office literally counting down to the event and sharing various sources for a live webcast. So it not only lifts the spirits of Indians around the globe but it was also a large commercial for the satellite launch services provided by ISRO. ISRO has now become the sixth organization to send a mission to the moon, following the US, Russia, European Space Agency, Japan and China.

Science popularization is another worthy aim achieved by this project, inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers in India. Remember October Sky and how the Sputnik caused so many children in the United States to take up Aeronautical Engineering as a career? This also reminds me of the reasons for the birth of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area. The story goes that when William Shockley wanted to set up Fairchild Semiconductors (I think), he chose the Bay Area because of the huge supply of engineers at NASA Ames in Mountain View. Could the engineers trained on Chandrayaan create their own technology ventures in the future? I hope so. India is also proud of its rocket scientists. We indirectly elected Abdul Kalam our president not too long ago. The former head of ISRO Dr K Kasturirangan is now a member of the Rajya Sabha. We could use plenty of smart people in our government.

Congratulations to the ISRO team for doing India proud!

2008-10-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Joe the Plumber Subterfuge

I have been an involved bystander on the US presidential campaign. It is hard to ignore it living in America... if you aren't being bombarded with negative commercials while watching TV already, the debates, the PBS documentaries and the various comedy programs poking fun at the candidates will definitely get you into the action. One problem makes me realize how ordinary people seem to fall for the subterfuge dished out by the Republicans.

I was trying to find out some information on income distributions in the United States. The census.gov does have some tables with that information, but they stop short of giving you a graph with distribution, showing you where you stack up against the rest of the country. (Conspiracy theory? I think so. Isn't that the most obvious way to present and parse income data?) There are other blogs that tell you how incomes are distributed and it doesn't look like a pretty picture. The authors of this site called www.lcurve.org says it is an L curve. There is a huge spike of super-rich Americans.

The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.

Concentration of wealth produces concentration of power that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Why does our government give tax cuts to those on the vertical spike that result in cuts in services for the rest of us? The horizontal spike has the votes, but the vertical spike has the influence! They own the media. Your TV set is their pipeline into your brain! They set the agenda and the terms of debate. Furthermore, by the time you enter the voting booth all the
“serious” candidates have been filtered and pre-selected by their ability to raise funds from those on the vertical spike. Those who can’t attract big money are marginalized.

That's an argument that is hard to fight. Clearly the less smart Americans clearly don't see their own benefit. Admittedly Barack Obama probably misguides voters in some areas as well, but the Joe the Plumber episode just shows the lack of intelligence on the part of vast stretches of the country and the levels to which Republican leaders are willing to fool their countrymen. That might be one of the reasons why you pay high-school teachers peanuts, and make Math uncool. No one will be smart enough to understand that they are being fleeced.

Barack Obama claims that people earning less than 250,000 dollars a year will see a decrease in taxes under him. But Joe the Plumber claims he earns 250,000 dollars a year, and so John Mccain claims that Barack Obama will increase your taxes. And so people making 50,000 dollars cheer for Joe the Plumber at McCain rallies. Wow that is a new low in misguiding people. How the average Americans fall for this is beyond me... Part of it might be to sugar-coat whatever you say with plaudits for "small-town values", calling yourself "Joe Sixpack and Hockey Mom", with conjuring connections between your opponent and Al Qaeda and spreading false rumors about his religion and political views. While you are at it call yourself a "maverick" a few dozen times.

Again Barack Obama doesn't say he will stop outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries. He says he will stop providing tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas. That doesn't mean that outsourcing will grind to a halt. But it does seem like he is trying to reduce taxes for the middle and lower classes and prevent bankruptcies from health problems.

During the last election I saw the same style of attack ads against John Kerry by George W. In fact that episode introduced a new verb into the English language, swift-boating. If the past is any predictor of future behavior, America shouldn't elect McCain. Someone who makes commercials like George W Bush, is likely to rule like him as well. Someone who makes commercials like Bush, may also be more likely to rule, unless the country smartened up in the last 4 years, and sees through this subterfuge.

2008-10-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

On being a drop in the brain drain ocean

I just read this excellent article on Sepia Mutiny about brain drain that got me thinking. I am a member of the brain drain generation. The vast majority of the people I studied with in engineering college (or high-school) are now working in America. I used to joke not too long ago that, I have a higher probability of bumping into a classmate from Pune in Silicon Valley than in Pune itself. I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, and I invite your perspective on the same. Another foregone conclusion among my contemporaries from Pune is that almost everyone ended up studying engineering (there are very few exceptions). With the plethora of engineering colleges in Pune, it is no surprise. I hate to be a walking talking cliche` in that regard.

The vast majority of my classmates who have continued to work in India, are working either directly or indirectly for large American multi-national firms. ( Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola, IBM are some of the names for directly working for an American firm, and Infosys, Wipro, TCS for indirectly working for a multi-national firm.) I also work for a large multi-national company based in California. So the biggest difference between my classmates in India and me is that I pay my taxes to America, while they all pay a third of their salaries to India. That is a substantial contribution monetarily and I cannot compete with that sitting in America. Some of my taxes end up in Iraq and some of theirs end up in the Swiss bank accounts of some corrupt politicians. My friends in India are also influencing India in many other ways, with their taste in music, food, art, books and movies. Being in India also implies that you support all the local businesses and employ servants at home. So financially it is a significant loss for India, if you disregard the dollars sent back home by NRIs.

If you are reading this blog sitting in India, you are probably doing this using a CPU designed by Intel, using an OS developed by Microsoft, using a browser developed by Mozilla. (and maybe using an RSS reader developed by Google). There were definitely a few Indians who worked on all of these components. The point I am trying to make is that technology these days is created by people from all over the world, and it benefits people all over the world, but in most cases by companies head-quartered in America, with a vast majority of their employees in America, but from all parts of the globe. Are nationality and patriotism outdated concepts in our flat integrated world?

My ex-roommate J used to say that there are positives to staying in India or America for any individual. In the Bay Area you can get home quickly but then you spend many hours doing laundry, cooking, cleaning. In India, you spend a lot of time on the commute, but then you have servants to take care of most of the house-work. These days most things in India are identical to America, at home, at workplaces, at the malls, the movie theaters and banks. So the only difference is the traffic on the roads and other services the government provides.

There are probably a lot of Indians in America who carry "I owe you"s for India, and that might be one of the reasons for the success for charitable organizations like Asha and Vibha. I have been thinking about some of these points while writing this article, and I think the issue is too complicated to come to any conclusion. After 6 years in America, it has started to feel like home, but I do feel out of place from time to time. I don't look or talk like the natives and I sense a slight resentment from time to time, because my people have inundated parts of the country. And despite my best attempts at watching Jeopardy for the last 6 years, I am always stumped by a lot of categories, most Americans would have no trouble with. I feel like a misfit in India too at times, but on the whole I am more comfortable with being a first class citizen in India. I would like my children to share my values, and I feel like India is the place to raise kids. I hope someday I manage to move back and make my own small contribution to India, instead of carrying an "I owe you" to my grave. If you guys have misgivings about working for an American firm, please form a start-up and give me a job! ;-)

2008-09-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Movies about Engineering

I sometimes wonder if I really wanted to become an engineer on many days, especially when I hear about the looming recession, talk of layoffs and various such problems. I am supposed to be an INTJ Myers-Briggs type, I don't know what that means but according to the people who tested me, Computer Hardware Engineer is my 15th favorable career. That's still up there preceded by various physical science careers. Dang why didn't I become a physicist and work at the Large Hadron Collider?

So I am sitting here watching Apollo 13 on USA Network on a Saturday afternoon. This is the nth rerun of the movie, but I can't help loving the movie. If there is a movie about engineering, with engineers right in the middle of the action this has to be it. I've heard before that American movies with any amount of science have to be dumbed down, or worse still have to be turned into action movies, for them to do well at the box office. Apollo 13 doesn't do any such thing and is still very engrossing. Solving problems is what engineers are paid for, and this is one of the few movies which is purely about that. When I first started working, I used to read bug reports with the abbreviation WAR and wonder what it meant. This happens a lot in the early days of an engineer I am sure. I thought of Write After Read hazards that one learns about at school in Computer Architecture textbooks, but that didn't work in the context. Later I realized it means workaround. Apollo 13's successful return to earth was all about many workarounds. The real life experience of finding a problem and then producing workarounds is a roller-coaster ride sometimes too, of course no one can make movies about my workarounds.

A couple other movies about engineering I can remember.... Robots. Again an excellent movie, and October Sky, another one of my favourites. I guess I do like engineering after all, if I like these movies. : )

2008-09-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

Chrome : Color my world!

I downloaded Google's Chrome web-browser yesterday after reading David Pogue's review on nytimes. I like it. I am not an advanced Mozilla user, so I don't know all the best plug-ins to install, but I definitely like how Chrome works by default. Given that most of us spend most of our time on computers browsing the web, it is a great idea to design the best possible browser.

Some of the pluses:
- Uses a much larger percentage of the screen than most browsers. A status bar that appears temporarily, no Google toolbar needed... you can type your query in the URL address field itself.
- Highlights the boxes you are filling out online.
- Seems more polite with handling passwords. Asks you whether you want to remember the password, after you have cleared the challenge and without a pop-up.
- Uses a lot of history and statistics on your usage. Type less to get to the web-pages you need to. Chrome remembers how you surfed yesterday.
- Doesn't keep asking you if you want to restore the last session.
- Doesn't create pop-ups even on Times of India. Wow! That used to be a real challenge for all the browsers I've worked with in the past.
- In line search like Mozilla.

And then there are some downsides:
- It hangs on some Flash plugins. It's not the most stable browser I know. It stops responding after you watch videos on YouTube sometimes.
- Rajas points out that Mozilla supplies an ad-blocker add-on too. Well Google may not supply us with one of those, given that they make their money on ads.

But for most parts it is a great browser. If they work around the stability issues, it would definitely be my favorite browser to date.

2008-09-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

I didn't expect this quite so soon, but then again it might not be very soon. Poo Na Gadgil Jewellers are setting up shop in our very own Sunnyvale. Clearly they must have realized there are way too many Puneris in the Bay Area. Parents keep visiting anyways. So now many of you could shop for your upcoming weddings in Sunnyvale itself.

Time for Chitale to open a store in the Bay Area now! High time I say! :)

2008-09-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

A childhood dream comes true : US Open 2008

I grew up watching Grand Slam tennis with my father on TV every year. My father is pretty big on tennis and I've not known too many people who could wake up at 6 am everyday to go play a couple of sets of tennis on the other side of town. So I was delighted when some of our friends got us tickets to watch the US Open, a women's quarter final game and a men's 4th round game. We made our way from Stamford to Flushing on the train last evening. After 2 hours we were blessed with this sight.

We got there just in time for the evening session which starts at 7 pm. Unfortunately for us the the Arthur Ashe stadium was not open yet, because the matches from the afternoon session had still not ended. Roger Federer was fighting a 5-set battle against Igor Andreev of Russia. Everyone was eagerly watching the scores for this match on the huge screens around the courts, for signs on when the wait would be over. Eventually Federer triumphed against his opponent and entered the quarter-finals.

Luckily they let moved the women's quarter final game between Jelena Jankovic of Serbia and Sybille Bammer of Austria to the Louis Armstrong stadium and we got decent seats close to the action.

It was a fairly challenging environment to play tennis in. Apart from touch and taste, the athletes were assaulted on all senses. (Three out of five is still a lot, trust me! :)) Planes taking off from La Guardia airport kept breaking the silence. Smoke filled the court probably from some hot-dog stands outside the stadium. And because this was a rescheduled game, people kept drifting into the stadium much to the chagrin of the players. Jankovic had little trouble besting her opponent. She won the game in straight sets, 6-1 6-4, although the second set was more closely contested.

Then we made our way through a sea of humanity into the Arthur Ashe stadium. The game started pretty soon, although it ended up being fairly one-sided. The game was between American Andy Roddick and Fernando Gonzalez of Chile`. The organizers probably gave the prime-time slot to an American, although the game was really not very entertaining itself. For most parts, Andy Roddick shot his 140 mile per hour serves and with seats in row Y, the second-last row in the house, the action wasn't very engrossing. There were no major rallies in the game. Roddick won 6-2, 6-4, 6-1 in 83 minutes.

The best part about the whole experience were the songs they played between games. The cameras caught people's antics and projected them on the huge video-screens inside the stadium. I also got to meet a bunch of people from my alma mater. The weirdest incident of the night was accidently meeting an alumnus of COEP, 1984 batch, when he overheard us talking about COEP.

Maybe next time I'll get to watch more interesting games.

2008-08-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

The Big Bang Theory : Something to look forward to on TV

Well so Star Trek ended, and then so did Seinfeld and Friends, and while many people make a life out of watching reruns of the last two shows even though they can recite the dialogs themselves, I want to get out of that club now. And one of the few escapes from that life of re-runs is a brand new series on CBS called The Big Bang Theory. Being the nerdy kid I am, I simply love this show. It is the first breath of fresh air on the telly since I left college.

The characters are all very funny. Sheldon and Leonard are brilliant nerdy roommates and stay across the hall from Penny, a beautiful normal girl who doesn't share their interest in science. In another sign of the arrival of Indians in American pop culture, one of their friends is Rajesh, who can't talk to women unless he is drunk, and whose parents nag the daylights out of him over video chat. Sheldon is an obsessive compulsive person but brilliant in his knowledge of physics.

The show tackles some of the usuals of nerd life from physics, comic books, Star Trek, astronomy, being stumped for words around pretty women and so on.

I simply love the title track by Barenaked Ladies and it fits so well with the theme of the show. The track is all about the evolution of the universe and human beings. Here is a video from YouTube of the same.

Don't miss this show! In India it shows on Zee Cafe`. If you'd like to watch clips online, CSB has put some of them here.

2008-08-23T02:18:00.000-07:00

Helloooo New England!!!

If you've watched the movie "You've Got Mail!", there is a scene where Tom Hanks's character (Joe Fox) boards a boat with two kids, (his aunt and his brother) and shouts out across the Hudson "Hellooo New Jerseyyy!!". The "Hellooo New England" is supposed to be said in a similar pitch, although unlike Tom Hanks I am actually in New England itself. For the uninitiated, New England is the north-eastern corner region of the United States above New York state. It was originally settled by the English persecuted in England, which might explain their choice of names.

I've moved to this region from the sunny Bay Area, because my wife is going to school to New York. So she is staying in Stamford CT and I am going to work out of my company's Bedford MA office which is around 30 mins from Boston. I had a fabulous time in the Bay Area, and I've enjoyed the great weather and good food there quite a bit. But this seems like a good time to discover a new region. I love travelling and discovering new places. So this should be a fun experience. In the past I have lived in Madison WI, and Louisville KY. So I have already covered a few regions of the United States so far. Sadly I'll have to change the name of this blog.

One of the interesting parts of this move was a flight on Virgin America. With all the recent drama on American airlines, flying is never quite a pleasurable experience. I was pleasantly surprised with my flight on Virgin. The ticket was fairly inexpensive... a one-way ticket from San Francisco to New York cost us only $170. The biggest advance is Virgin's on-board entertainment system called Red.

Every seat includes a tiny controller and also a small keyboard, and two credit card swipe machines to purchase movies or food.

You could do a variety of different things with the keyboard from chatting with neighbours, to playing games like Doom or Mahjongg.

Another novelty is being able to watch live TV.

Google Maps helps you track the position of the plane, although with a slight time-delay, and you could even zoom-in to find your precise location.

The other difference between a Virgin flight and others is the lighting of the cabin while the plane is on the tarmac. It is accompanied by some music, although towards the end of the flight is is just annoying. The leg-room in economy is also substantially greater than the regular carriers. You get black leather seats.

You can also create playlists out of their music selection. Just a warning though... Don't forget to carry your own headphones. Virgin doesn't provide you with one. Neither do they carry an in-flight magazine.

You can order food any time you choose, and a flight attendant will promptly deliver your food. Keep in mind, the only thing that was included even on the SFO-JFK flight was the drink. So you are looking to spend an extra $10 per person at least. And that brings me to the biggest negative with Virgin. The food selection left much to be desired. We had three choices for a meal... a beef wrap, a salad, or hummus with pita slices. While all the choices were very healthy, I would have loved some choices with white meat.

On the whole I was very impressed with Virgin America and I would definitely choose it ahead of other airlines next time even if I have to pay a little more. They definitely did a lot of out-of-the-box thinking and came up with many ways to please the customer.

2008-06-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

Made in India : Opium exports during the British Raj

Tintin, the indestructible Belgian explorer, also made a trip to the Orient in the comic book "The Blue Lotus". I don't recollect the entire story from that episode but I do remember reading about Opium addiction in China in that book and many others. It is common knowledge that the British brought Opium to China. If you were wondering where all that Opium was produced, Amitav Ghosh has an answer for you.

In this book entitled Sea of Poppies, he writes about this and other stories from colonial India. The BBC interviewed Amitav Ghosh about his book here.

2008-06-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

Flying out of Pune

Flying in and out of Pune is never quite hassle-free. For instance, when we were flying from Pune back to San Francisco last week, we started for Mumbai at around 6 pm, even though our flight was at 2am. One needs to reach the airport 3 hours before departure... so one should arrive at the airport around 11pm. It takes roughly 3 hours to get from Pune to the airport, allowing some buffer in case the roads a clogged either because of traffic or the rains... so start from home 5 hours in advance. All this implies that one needs to add 8 hours to the flying time of 20 hours. So in total we were travelling for about 32 hours from door to door (There was a 4 hour halt in London on this trip). Trust me that is not enjoyable at all. Thankfully the Mumbai-Pune expressway and improvements at the Mumbai airport have sped up this travel, but I definitely think one could make a case for some direct flights to Pune. (I hope an airline executive reads this someday.)

Although I don't have exact numbers, I think the number of people flying to Pune, who are forced to fly to Bombay is pretty sizable. They may not be able to fill up a plane everyday, but they should be able to fill up an entire plane every week. Although there have been attempts at building a better international airport in Pune in the last few years (most notably in Chakan), there is no observable progress on the issue.

A few months ago I read reports of Lufthansa starting a direct flight from Frankfurt to Pune. Initially I cheered at the thought of saving 3-4 hours on every day-long journey to Pune. Unfortunately it looks like the Lufthansa flight is all business-class. So unless you can afford to spend more than $6000 for just the Frankfurt-Pune leg, that isn't an option. Clearly it will be a huge time saver though. Home is under an hour from the airport which helps whether you are flying in or out of India. I hope Lufthansa corrects this situation and adds at least a few economy seats to this flight. I'd be willing to pay a slight premium for this convenience, but I definitely cannot shell out 4 times the price of an economy seat on British Airways.

2008-06-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

Pursuit of Happyness

I read this excellent article recently about making choices from Columbia Business School. I highly recommend it. It classifies people into two groups, called Maximicers and Satisficers. Maximizers are the kind of people who keep looking for the best choice. For instance when watching TV, they will check out all 400 channels and then pick the best after wasting a lot of time on choosing. Satisficers just scan until they find an acceptable choice and watch that channel.

Maximicers have a lot of problems when it comes to career decisions and are rarely happy with their choices. I think I am a maximcer but reading this article makes me realize that I should take it easy a little.

2008-06-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

Eurotrip Tips

I recently completed my first trip to Europe and I'd like to share some lessons I learnt on the trip, which might help others. We covered London, Paris, Florence, Pisa and Rome during this vacation.

1) Converting Money
We once converted some dollars into euros close to the Tour Eiffel. I realized that we didn't really get a whole lot of money back, but I was in too much of a hurry to analyze the transaction at the time. The receipt was in French, so again I really had to understand the context, which is harder to do with so many pretty sights to digest. Here are the basics I gathered... Conversion Rate: this is what you expect to get for your dollars. The official rate was around 1.57 dollars per euro at the time. One-time processing fee: this was something I wasn't expecting. They charged me around 6 euros for every transaction. Given this it makes sense to convert a large amount once only, instead of many small transactions. I realized that the Paris train station had better rates than converters close to the major landmarks. (Okay I have a sample size of 2 only, but the train station had reasonable prices.) In Italy, I ended up using an ATM machine close to our hotel all the time. I've been told that this is the best way to convert (according to Frommers). Credits cards are the next best.

2) Restaurants
On the whole many restaurants were reasonable and charged as much as one expected, but I had two bad experiences. At a cafe` close to the Notre Dame we were charged 8.60 euros for water. The waiter claimed that the glasses were chilled (and hence worth 8.60) and the water was free. In case you need to order tap water ask for "une verre d'eau". Watch out for waiters who make it seem like fries or soup is included in the price of the entree.

3) Hotels
If you are used to hotels in America, you won't like what $100 per night buys you in Europe these days. Almost all the hotels I stayed with were above my $100 price point and none of them had a bathroom inside the room.

One of the best deals on my trip was a Formule1 Hotel in Paris, a recommendation from my French co-worker Phil. The cost per night was 46 Euros only. To warn you the room is very functional... It had a bed, a TV, a lamp, a sink and a table with a chair. The toilets and bathrooms are in a common area, but it is fairly easy to find a good clean one. Their breakfast was a good deal too... a great way to start the day and for 3.90 euros only, probably the least expensive meal on our trip.

We completely loved our hotel in Florence. It was called Hotel Sampaoli and I booked it on hostels.com. The staff was really friendly and gave a lot of good suggestions. I wish we could have stayed longer with them.

Our hotel in Rome, Hotel Des Artistes, was good too. It was close to the Termini train station (A 5 minute walk from the station). Although a slightly seedier part of town, the benefits of staying close to Termini far outweigh the negatives. A metro station was right below the hotel and lots of ATM machines, grocery stores were close by.

4) Learning the language
I can't stress this enough. Learning the language helps enhance the whole experience. One should at least know enough to order food, get tickets (billets bi-yays in French). The BBC has created a great resource for learning French. Knowing the numbers is also a good idea.

2008-04-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

Creation of Employment

I overheard this conversation at work once. A goes, "Do you know why the government creates complicated tax laws?". B responds, "What do you mean?" A replies, "Well creating a complicated tax code is one way of generating employment. You create a new industry out of tax consultants, companies that write software to calculate taxes and many such other functions."

Could it be that governments take other decisions in a similar manner to increase employment? For instance cars vs public transportation. Clearly more public transportation is good for the environment. I had read about a conspiracy theory where car companies bought out the tram companies in many American metros and dismantled them altogether, so as to create demand for cars.

Having a thriving auto-industry sustains so many businesses. From the car manufacturing side, auto-designers, engineers, assembly workers and technicians. Car dealerships employ salesmen come in next for selling the car. More cars implies more accidents... Auto-insurance is a big business as well. Car repair is yet another industry which thrives with more cars around. Gas stations, road construction and repair, tollways, toll plazas, car breakers. I admit that having a thriving public transportation system does need lots of drivers, ticket checkers and such low-wage workers, but cars and allied businesses create much more employment, in my opinion. More cars also implies more fuel... and that's something that has brought oil wealth to various parts of the world.

2008-03-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

What is Ajinomoto?

Pune has always had its share of excellent Indian-Chinese restaurants. The Chinese Room in Camp was one of my favourites. There were a couple of other good places close to home, Peking Chinese close to Symbiosis College, which closed sometime in late 90s. I remember going there as a kid, and learning about Chinese astrology and the year of the pig and so on. It is always so much fun to learn about another culture and their cuisine. (The Chinese we have in India, though seems to be our own concoction. My Chinese co-workers have never heard of Manchurian Chicken.) My parents tell me that Mainland China is pretty good too.

I've always loved sweet-corn chicken soup, and chicken manchurian... Top it off with chinese fried rice, or Lo Mein or Chop Suey and you have a perfect meal. Thankfully for me, some enterprising folks in the Bay Area have started an Indian Chinese place in Mountain View called Temptations. I love this place. Finally some food that is comparable to restaurants in Pune and the decor is great too. If you live in the area do check out this site http://www.temptationsca.com

My father almost never cooked. The only time I remember him helping out with cooking was when we were making Chinese at home. Armed with a book of recipes, donning an apron, my father instructed me on how to chop spring onions, grate carrots,(while cutting some vegetables himself) leaving the work requiring more skill for my mom. My father's favourite Manchow Soup and Vegetable Manchurian were the usual edibles on the menu. Most of the recipes called on using Soy Sauce, Chilli Sauce and a dash of Ajinomoto or MSG (my dad used to call it Ajnimoto). Only later was MSG banned from our house after reports in the newspapers that it caused some sort of brain damage. Given the competitive environment we have in India, clearly no child soon to enter class 10th/12th should have any MSG. Dealing with brain damage on top of the congenital brain damage was impossible. Somehow though the fervor behind cooking Chinese also died at our home around the same point. My dad took a reclusive posture towards cooking as usual, and my overworked mom continued doing all the house-hold chores. Today there was an article in the Times about MSG, and how there is still no conclusive evidence about it's evil effects. I used to think Ajinomoto was the Chinese name for MSG, but Wikipedia points out that it is the Japanese corporation which discovered the chemical in 1909. It's flagship product is MSG of course.

2008-02-29T23:36:00.000-08:00

An Academy Out Of It's Mind!

I like a lot of movies that were Best Picture Oscar winners. Gandhi, Amadeus, Chariots of Fire, Gladiator, American Beauty... I can go on. This year's best picture winner in my opinion was a terrible movie. I think the basic plot shouldn't have holes for a picture to be great. Acting, directing, cinematography, can only go so far. No Country for Old Men had a weak plot.

<--------Spoiler Warning----->
The first half of the movie is slightly interesting. The protagonist and the villain are both trying to pot a million dollars neither own. One of them is poor and good, the other is devil incarnate, randomly killing people for no good reason. And guess who finally stays alive and free? Tommy Lee Jones plays a cop with an undecipherable Texas accent. In fact a Texan friend complained that he couldn't figure out what was being said in many parts.

In comparison some of the other nominees were much better. Juno, for instance was a simple funny movie, again with great acting and major names. Among my favorite movies this year was Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis". It is the story of an Iranian girl growing up during the Iranian Revolution in the form of graphic novel. Simply brilliant. It makes a big statement, about the proletariat, how some people use "opiate of the masses" to create a repressive society.

2008-02-12T20:47:00.000-08:00

I want to become a scientist!

As a school-going kid I used to love science with all my heart. There were a few things which contributed to my love for the field. Television was one of them. I loved watching a series called Horizon, which used to show on BBC World every week. One of the first episodes I watched was called "Molecules with Sunglasses". It was the story of how Harry Kroto and Richard Smalley discovered a new isotope of Carbon called C60.(Both won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 for this discovery.) Apart from graphite and diamond, carbon has an allotrope made up of 60 atoms. One of the stories on this episode discussed how they discovered the shape of the new molecule. The two scientists spent a lot of time wondering what the molecule might look like, and finally realized that it consisted of a pentagon surrounded by a hexagon on each side. After talking to a few more people they realized that this was exactly how a football is made... a black leather pentagon surrounded by 6 white leather hexagons.

Soon I became a Horizon regular. One of my favourite episodes was converted into a book, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". It was an interview with Richard Feynman.
I've added a link to the same here:

School allowed me to develop my interest in science even further. Loyola had a fabulous library and all students were allowed to borrow one non-fiction and one fiction book every week. Non-fiction used to be simple for me. I borrowed all sorts of books about science. Relativity, Quantum Physics, biographies of Galileo, Einstein, Newton.... Fiction I only read books about Sherlock Holmes. During one of the lunch reference sessions, I remember trying to read the Principia Mathematica, although I didn't understand anything at all.

Then in class 8 I was selected to spend a summer at IUCAA in Pune, the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I wrote a student paper about the sun and it's energy generation and learnt about nuclear fusion. I loved the life of a scientist at IUCAA and loved going there everyday on my bicycle riding through the University. Everything was so clean and organized and well-designed. The lawns in the center of the institute were impressive. There were statues of Einstein, Newton and Aryabhatta I think. The highlight of the lawns was an apple tree, believed to be a direct descendant of the Apple tree under which Newton sat before discovering gravity. One of the lawns was a fractal, with an equilateral triangle being split into more equilateral triangles. There was also a Foucault's pendulum in one of the corridors. I could almost imagine getting older there.

The Exploratory was another favourite for me. It was started by two former physics professors at the University of Pune I think. Professor VG Bhide and Professor Desai I remember very distinctly. We played with a lot of things at this science lab, from7400 series ICs, to vedic mathematics... and from electrolytes to experiments with applied mechanics. And come summer, the Exploratory summer camp consisted of numerous scientists giving one hour talks about their work in layperson terms. Lovely! The best time of my life!

2008-01-08T09:35:00.001-08:00

The 1-lakh car

The NY Times had a 2 page article about the 1-lakh Rupee "People's car" to be released soon by Tata Motors. It is being highlighted as a feat of engineering, being able to produce something at such a low price.

While there is some truth to that, I feel that not feats of engineering are beneficial. There are innumerable problems, which I am sure some of my Indian friends will concur with.

First is the congestion on the roads. There is close to no space on the roads for the vehicles currently on the streets. Add another million cars, I wouldn't want to be caught in the rush hour with those. Ramanand once talked about the lack of planning inherent with such things in India. He was talking about office space and how anyone can approve so many office buildings when the approach road into that area is clogged every rush hour. The 1 lakh car will be a similar debacle.

Second is parking. On my trips to Pune one of the biggest problems is parking and the second biggest problem is the increase in congestion from vehicles parked haphazardly on the sides of the roads. We hardly have any multi-storey parking structures.

Third issue is the rickshaw phenomenon. I personally think the rickshaw is one of the worst inventions ever. What's more is that rickshaw drivers will use kerosene instead of petrol and emit pollution enough for your eyes to catch. Could a similar effect be seen if we produce so many cheap cars? Gas prices are only going up. Even if you aren't as concerned by global warming, it does cause smog and increases rates of various respiratory disorders.

The only positive could be that assuming the People's car replaces most of the 2 and 3 wheelers, traffic may be more well-behaved.

2007-12-31T00:55:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping to start blogging regularly on this new blog. Do check it out and refer to your friends if you think they will find it useful.

2007-12-21T15:22:00.000-08:00

The suitcase story

This is something that happened in 2003. I was in grad school and I was to go home to Pune for a month long break. So I got my suitcases out to start packing. Unfortunately, I forgot the combination on my large Samsonite suitcase. Being the poor graduate student that I was, I didn't have a car to go buy a new one. (And neither did I have a lot of spare cash.) So being frustrated with the whole situation, I finally resorted to using a butter knife to slide the lock off the suitcase. So I did open the suitcase and I was able to push the lock back on safely after packing, but I wasn't able to change the combination.

At the Chicago airport, I handed over my bags to TSA and the security check guy goes, "So what's the combination?". I gulped for a second realizing that now I had to hand over my bags unlocked. I explained to him that I had forgotten the combination, but if he wanted to open it, he could just slide something sharp under the lock and click it open. The TSA guy smiled on hearing this. The paranoid me, hoped he wouldn't think I stole this bag from someone.

A few minutes later, I got my boarding pass and I started walking towards the boarding area. I hear some guy shouting behind me "4224". I was puzzled for a second. It was the same TSA guy, he whispered smiling "It's the combination to your suitcase". I asked, "How did you find it?". He told me that they have a machine for these things. In case some person forgets to unlock his bag, they have to use a device to open the lock. I've changed my combination ever since, but clearly that won't help dissuade the motivated thief.

2007-12-17T15:33:00.000-08:00

Bravo Google! : Public transportation to work

One hears frequent complaints (and I am guilty of the crime too) about the lack of good public transportation in the Bay Area. The complaints are usually followed by plaudits showered on the transportation systems in New York. The only person I knew that took the train to work was Atul 3 years ago, who had just started working at my company and didn't get a new car for a few months. He used to take over an hour to cover the 15 minute distance to work, which seemed like a big waste of time.

So today when I went to the http://www.vta.org site I found a search service from Google. It is a feature in Google Maps called "Take Public Transportation". Previously I had taken the VTA Light Rail to downtown Mountain View and to downtown San Jose on different occassions, and found it to be a fairly convenient way to get around South Bay. One could also make a connection to Caltrain, if one were so inclined, and make a trip to San Francisco as well. Anyways the Google search result was very easy to understand. It was in the same format as the usual Google Maps route, clearly showing the travel time, and the bus stops. It didn't find the nearest stop to work but did give me directions for the second nearest bus-stop.

Here is a sample route:

Travel time by car is roughly 15 minutes. Turned out the travel time by light-rail and bus was around 30 minutes. To try out this new adventure I asked Sai to drop me off at the VTA light rail station in the morning today. The train was pulling in just as I got to the station and it left before I could get a ticket. The next train was 15 minutes later. 3 stops (and 5 minutes) later I got off near Great America Parkway. I had missed my connection, the number 60 bus. So I tried calling VTA's customer service line. The automated system told me that the next bus number 60 was 15 minutes later.

The commuters around me were mostly students, and few other Indians. I started chatting with the only other Indian person at the bus-stop. I realized that I rarely did that these days. The person, Sathish was surprised that I had been working here for 3 years and that I was still taking the train. He was here in Santa Clara on a short business trip at Motorola and was an amiable smiling guy. It didn't make sense for him to buy or rent a car for such a short visit, and so his boss bought him a monthly pass for VTA instead.

The next bus arrived and about 10 minutes later, the bus dropped me right next to our campus, although a remote corner of it. 2 minutes later I was at my desk. Total travel time 50 minutes. Total cost $1.75. As the price of a gallon goes up, I think it will start making more sense to use VTA everyday. I loved the idea and I hope to continue... Lowering my carbon footprint a little. One piece of advice, get to the station 5 minutes early.

2007-12-13T14:50:00.000-08:00

It's raining engineers!

This is in response to a post on Ashutosh's blog about the sorry state of sciences in India.

Here is how I see it. With the flat world, instead of doing India's IT jobs only, Indians are now doing the whole world's IT jobs. Admittedly these young engineers are making way more money than their parents did, but in the process India loses experts in all other fields.

I agree with Professor Rao about the lack of complexity in most IT jobs and how IT jobs are mundane. I think most people wouldn't do these jobs for as long as they do, because they don't truly enjoy them. This also means that most companies have productivity issues, attrition issues but that is another topic on it's own.

I disagree with Vivek about science only being about long-term projects and work that may not lead to practical benefits.

For instance if the Indian Government invested heavily in photo-voltaic cell research, where India decides to become the leader in high-efficiency photovoltaics, maybe in 10 years we will have a solar-energy industry which doesn't perform back-office operations for the world, but rather becomes the front-office that sends all it's monotonous manufacturing to another country, and keeps a higher fraction of the profits. By keeping the salaries of educators as low as they do in India, we do manage to keep inflation low, but we also manage to churn out millions of uneducated college graduates.

In the longer term economics is a big equalizer and sooner than later, the costs of doing business in India are going to be higher than some other country. The people with an aptitude for science, but training and experience in engineering, may find it hard to adjust in such a scenario. IT engineers made a quick buck for a few years, but no one ever assured them job security. The industry is brutal in that respect. Profit is the keyword, loyalty and charity are rare lapses.

2007-12-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

Spam on Yahoo! Mail

One thing I am definitely not very "Yahoo!" about is the amount of spam I get in my Yahoo! Mail account. It is so bad it is not even funny. It doesn't seem like Yahoo! takes any effort in blocking spam. I have been marking the mail as spam for ages now to no avail. Here is what my inbox looks like today:

How hard is blocking based on the keywords like "Medication" and "Nursing" in the subject field? So 20 messages with all possible kind of spam. I think there is just one legit email there.

This is the final straw for me. I am migrating completely to GMail. So long Yahoo! !

2007-12-07T00:35:00.000-08:00

Tryst with Destiny: Archives of TIME Magazine!

My father once told me that Winston Churchill was so opposed to the idea of Indian independence that during the debate on the Independence of India Act in the British Parliament, he predicted that the second-generation Indian politicians would be so corrupt that "They will tax even air!". I have to warn the readers of this blog that so far in spite of my best efforts, I haven't been able to confirm the veracity of this quote.

So hoping to ascertain the truth of the matter I tried to look through the archives of the BBC and TIME magazine. Although I didn't find any supporting evidence for the statement, I did learn many other interesting facts about India 60 years ago.

On racial discrimination in the India before independence, this article quotes:

The Bombay Royal Yacht Club, where no Indian could tread even as a member's guest, was about to close; the Government had refused to renew its lease. No more would the pink pukka sahibs and their leathery memsahibs stare glassily over the glassy bay. Gone from most of the smart hotels were the signs "Europeans only." In cool Simla, Indians now jostled along the Mall where 20 years ago no person in Indian dress would have been allowed.

To be barred from places in one's own motherland, is probably discrimination of the highest order. Thankfully these practices ended 60 years ago.

On the positives and negatives of British Rule over India:

The Balance Sheet. What after two centuries could be said of British rule in India? Credits & debits were both enormous. About as much land is irrigated in India today as in all the rest of the world. The Empire's biggest iron and steel plant is at Jamshedpur. The British had built up in India an incorruptible judicial system, a good police force, a vast (if substandard) network of roads, and the world's fourth largest railway system.

Yet Indians were still among the world's poorest people. Seventy-five percent hovered perpetually between gnawing hunger and outright starvation. Malaria, bubonic plague and a host of other diseases made an Indian's life expectancy at birth the world's lowest — 27 years.

The city of Rajahmundry would become Rajamahendravaram, which would be harder to spell, but since 87% of Indians could not write that would not matter so much.

Pandit Nehru in the Discovery of India talked about the wholesale looting of India that the British practiced and how the railway system and the roadways were all just a means for the British to steal the riches of my motherland. I think the magnitude of the British "despotism" can be judged best by these two numbers. The average life expectancy was 27 years and 87% of the population was illiterate. I am sure the per capita income would be similarly abysmal.

Much as we Indians revel in bashing our elected governments, and occasionally wax eloquent about quotes from British despots, the truth is India has done exceedingly well since she became free. Reminders like these from our past can serve to show how much better things are for at least a sizable fraction of the population. If we manage to share the benefits of freedom with more people in the next 60 years, it would all have been worthwhile. Whether India would have fared better under the rule of British despots for another 60 years is a question we shall never find a conclusive answer to.

Correction: Although I haven't been able to find a reliable source, this is the quotation from Churchill that my father refers to. There are references to this all over the Indian blogosphere.
"Power will go into the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters. Not a bottle of water nor a loaf of bread shall escape taxation. Only air will be free and the blood of these hungry millions will be on the head of Mr Atlee. These are men of straw whom no trace will be found after a few years."

2007-12-06T00:16:00.000-08:00

Hola Los Angeles!

In typical Bay Area newly-wed fashion, Sai and I decided to make a road-trip down to Las Vegas over Thanksgiving Break. I usually am wary of day-long drives, but on this occasion I was emboldened by the recent acquisition of an extra driver. (Pardon the phrasing Sai! ;)) On a last minute whim, I decided to use up my floating holiday to start the long weekend a day early and beat the peak Thanksgiving traffic. Our first stop was Los Angeles, roughly a 6-hour drive from San Jose.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." I am perpetually reminded of this statement when I am in the Los Angeles metro area. Los Angeles is the archetype for the mega-metropolis, bursting at its seams, a sea of humanity without an end in sight, unclean, lacking any unifying theme. Grid-locked highways with 5 lanes in both directions are common, filled with rude drivers who refuse to let others change into their lane, unless held at gun-point. LA is every car driver's worst nightmare, and occasionally every carpool driver's dream (LA carpool lanes are the most elaborate I have ever seen). After visiting LA about 4 times in the last 3 years I have realized there are few sights there worth a visit. One of them is the Getty Center museum close to Santa Monica. No expense has been spared in the design and upkeep of this museum. The well-manicured lawns, the well-designed rock gardens, the supremely well-chosen pieces of art on display, make the Getty Center a must visit for every tourist in LA.

There were a couple of interesting exhibitions in progress at the Getty that day. One was an exhibition of photographs by Edward Weston, a very famous California photographer of the early 20th century. Sai and I had heard about Ansel Adams during our Photography course at Foothill College, and it turned out Edward Weston collaborated with Ansel Adams. Weston was a member of the F64 club. F64 refers to the aperture setting on the camera these guys loved to take pictures with, to get crystal clear sharpness for the entire scene being photographed. Weston's subjects included a wide range of California scenery... Yosemite, Death Valley, Carmel-By-The-Sea, San Francisco. There were many other objects like peppers. Mr Weston also photographed his many lovers in nude. Photographers and their models! :)

The other photography exhibit was that of a more contemporary photographer called Luc Delahaye. The subjects included the Asian Tsunami, Darfur, the Oil crisis and so on. There were more color photographs than the Weston exhibit this time. The picture below captures the scene at an OPEC summit.

After spending a few hours at the Getty Center (and a few more at the Museum gift store ;)), we made our way through the LA rush hour to our hotel in Hollywood. Hollywood, is the complete antithesis of the glamorous version of Hollywood one imagines after watching all those movies. Anyways we did the usual Grauman's Chinese Theater (to see the autographs of the famous stars in clay) and Hollywood Walk of Fame routine and went to bed. I'll write about Las Vegas in the next post.

2007-11-26T23:38:00.000-08:00

A Just Cause

This blog has woken up from it's deep slumber to support a just cause. I am referring to the Writer's Strike which is currently in progress, and whose effects are all too apparent to the regular viewers of many nightly shows hosted by Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert. If you miss Jon Stewart's show as well here is the latest creation from the writers at the Daily Show:

And here is something from the makers of the Colbert Report:

I think the writers are some of the most talented people in the entertainment business. The actors are the looks behind the operations and the writers the brains. It is such a shame that writers are having to resort to a strike to earn what they rightly deserve. This video talks about how the writers currently get about 4c for every $19.99 DVD that is sold. This strike is just about the writers asking for 4c more. To the media moguls and the AMPTP executives out there. Shame on you!

Here is what the strike is all about:

2007-10-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Did you feel it?

We all felt this scary earthquake tonight. It was close to 8:10 here and I was on my bed surfing. Suddenly the bed starts shaking pretty violently and I first tried to duck under the bed. It was too low, so I ran outside and sat under my dining table until the tremors died down. I live on the third floor, so usually the tremors are stronger around here. I found out from the USGS site that this was a 5.6 magnitude earthquake.

I had blogged about Jim Berkland, who made earthquake predictions. I found this prediction on his website at 850pm.

"PREDICTIONS FOR OCTOBER:

As we approach the 18th anniversary of the World Series Quake it is startling to consider that most local graduating high school seniors were not alive to experience the biggest Bay Area quake since 1906. (The extreme tides of the next three months should acquaint them with a seismic experience.)

The Seismic Window of October 23-31, 2007 is based on the Full Moon of October 25, the very close lunar perigee only six hours later, and the 8.3 ft. Golden Gate tides on October 27th, the highest since last June. Considering these factors I am 80% confident in predicting one or more quakes with the following parameters:"

2007-10-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

To all you "Microserfs" out there!

I don't read a lot of fiction. The reason is that most of the so-called classics that I have read, fail to keep my interest alive for very long. A prime example of this is Ayn Rand. I probably took many months to finish "The Fountainhead" and have tried in vain to read "Atlas Shrugged" for the last couple of weeks. Ms Rand's style is so long-winded, and although she does have some good philosophical lessons to expound, you could skip many pages and not really miss much. ("Anthem" is an exception. That is one of her works I really liked.) I've tried reading the finest works of Carson McCullers, Virginia Woolf and Tolkien unsuccessfully too (I hated LOTR). So now I read more non-fiction. The reader isn't required to read all the way through, and he still learns something no matter where the book stops being interesting. My point is that if I have to force myself to finish a book like it is homework, it stops being fun. Also stating the obvious, I do like to learn interesting things along the way... Someday I hope to be a contestant on Jeopardy!

Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs" was a very pleasant surprise, given that it is a piece of fiction. I haven't made too many good friends through my blog but Priyanka is one exception to that rule. While some of my failed attempts at reading good fiction came through her recommendations, "Microserfs" is one I will wholeheartedly recommend further. There is obviously a lot I can relate to in this particular work. The title characters are all techies working at Microsoft in the 1990s. They share the very same lives... the seemingly never-ending years of test-writing, bug-fixing, new products, stock options, career anxieties and so on... Coupland also makes a statement about impossible deadlines set by management. This probably rings true to many employees in the tech world. What was even more uncanny was the love for Lego, Star Trek and Jeopardy espoused by many of the characters in the story. I don't know a lot of geeks who care for all or even some of those.

I loved Douglas Coupland's style. Jeopardy! categories in bulleted lists!! For instance, the narrator Dan introduces himself like so:

"I am danielu@microsoft.com If my life was a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:
- Tandy products
- Trash TV of the late 70s and 80s
- The history of Apple
- Career anxieties
- Tabloids
- Plant life of the Pacific Northwest
- Jell-O-1-2-3"

The story revolves around the lives of 6 occupants of a Redmond home, Microsoft employees. Dan, Abe, Todd, Susan, Bug, Michael and Dan's love-interest Karla. Most nerd archetypes are represented. Todd is the fitness freak, who only eats healthy and spends a lot of time sculpting a great body. Abe is a rich millionaire, who still maintains a normal techie lifestyle. Susan is the activist, organizing protest marches and the like. Michael, is the genius, who writes beautiful code, "the Mozart to all our Salieri's" as Dan describes him. Dan, the narrator, keeps writing random stuff trying to make sense out of his sub-conscious thoughts. On a more conscious level, the whole book is written like a journal kept on a computer, mostly one entry for every day of the work week. There are tonnes of interesting tidbits throughout the book. One of my favourites so far was about area codes:

""Did you know you can figure out how important your state was circa 1961 by adding up the code's three digits? Zero equals 10."
"No"
"It's because zeros used to take forever to go around the little rotary dial-while ones zipped along the quickest. The lowest possible code 212, went to the busiest place, New York City. Los Angeles got 213. Alaska got 907. See my point?" "

So far I have read the first 110 pages with few interruptions. Thanks Priyanka all the same, for an excellent recommendation. Fiction, afterall isn't all bad!

2007-09-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

Saving the World, one step at a time

To a great extent I have tried to reduce my carbon foot-print by putting some thought into daily activities and energy consumption.

- I always use a plate and real silverware for lunch and dinner. People around me, all really smart folks, insist on using to-go boxes for lunch everyday. Thankfully my employer is now only using bio-degradable boxes, so the trash will decompose eventually but will release a lot of methane into the air. Also manufacturing, transporting the boxes and junk will cause more energy consumption. Some hot water and soap to clean the dishes and forks is definitely better.

- I am biking to work sometimes. I don't see more than one or two other people who do that on any given day. Why? I think it's almost a no-brainer that biking is a good alternative. In the Bay Area there are bike-lanes all over. I take 15 mins to drive to work and 30 mins to bike. The numbers might be similar for a lot of people.

- Using CFLs. Okay CFL adoption is probably much higher than other energy-saving measures. Switching off lamps during the day and using sunlight, switching off lamps in empty rooms... I am trying to do this whenever I can.

- Taking shorter baths. I tended to just take a hot shower for 30 mins+ before. Keeping it short, 5-10 mins saves a lot of energy and water.

- I am also working on making computer chips consume less power at work. I also use only one LCD screen, to save some more power.

- Taking a bag along when I go shopping for groceries. When I forget I use paper.

A family in New York actually took this theme all the way and drastically changed their life for a year. No-Impact Man.

2007-07-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

What's happening in my neck of the woods?

It's been a while since I posted anything on this blog, so I thought this seems like as good a time as any. I haven't been able to post anything recently for most parts because I have been much busier than usual.

The latest from my end is that I have moved. I now live in Sunnyvale. I only moved a couple of miles away from my Santa Clara home and I love the new 3rd floor 1-bedroom apartment. It is sunny, a characteristic endowed in the name of the city where it is located.

I have been out of the gym for sometime. This week I finally went a couple of times, I have put on a couple of pounds, but it should be easy to shed those hopefully. As long as more pounds don't burden my body I should be fine.

I am taking a course at Stanford this semester through my employer. MS&E 237 Progress in WorldWide Communications. For the course term-paper I decided to analyze the teardowns of various cellphones and figure out what components are in there, who makes them, what the prices are of these devices, the profit margins and so on. I read about 15 teardowns this weekend. Every week we have two speakers, some of the top executives of their respective organizations. The course requires a homework write-up every week as well, analyzing one of the issues covered in the talks the previous week. For instance, I wrote about Broadband Access Issues in India, the Telecom Regulatory Environment in China, and wrote about the Cellphone-Cancer connection. So I am learning something to say the least.

Sai moved here about a month ago. So everything acquired a rosy hue. :) Anyways more in my next post.

2007-06-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

iPhone Vs myPhone

Cost:
iPhone costs $499 or $599 after you've signed a 2 year contract with Cingular.

myPhone costs $18 and no contract with Cingular. In fact when you buy this pay-as-you-go Phone, you get $10 worth of talk time free. In effect myPhone costs $8.

Features:
iPhone: is a phone, a camera, a music player and an internet browser.

myPhone: is barely even a phone. Some days it wakes me up doubling as an alarm. It triples as a girl repellant. Ideal function for married men.

If I lost it:
iPhone: I'd turn suicidal, because it is almost as valuable as my life. The person who finds it will almost certainly not return it back.

myPhone: I just fast for one meal and buy me a new one for free. If someone finds it, they are certain to return it... or throw it into a dumpster.

If you are seen using one:
iPhone: People think you are a cool, rich person with good taste. Maybe even a spendthrift who will turn suicidal when he loses his phone.

myPhone: People run away from you, and then you can call them to ask why?

Marketing:
Apple spends millions of dollars to produce snazzy ads for the iPhone.

Motorola spends millions of dollars, so that people won't find out that they made myPhone.

Steve Jobs advertizes the iPhone = iJobs

I advertize myPhone = iJobless

2007-06-03T23:22:00.000-07:00

A Laid Back Weekend!

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.

So guess what I did this weekend? I pretended to be a millionaire for the weekend and did nothing! :) It feels so good to do nothing productive, nothing useful.

On Friday night I went out with Sai's cousin Varun to Banana Leaf for dinner. If you have never had Malaysian food, it is an interesting experience. It is very closely related to Indian and Thai food. My favourite appetizer has always been roti prata (so close to Roti Paratha), which comes with fluffy crispy roti and a curry style dip. The next day I helped him move into his apartment in Mountain View.

Saturday afternoon I slept and then went to Borders in the night to read random books. I picked up the New York Times Almanac. It was an interesting read. I loved the compressed history of India that they have in it, listing all the major historical events. Even the recent past does seem like a violent time if you go by that description... Babri masjid demolition, Bombay riots, Kargil War, Attack on the parliament and so on. Then of course most news-worthy stories are such events. The final paragraph talking about the great strides that India made with Green Revolution to feed all it's people, the IT revolution also feels nice for a change. There have been positive developments. I also looked for a John Mayer CD, but I didn't want to spend $20 on it. So I backed out. Sorry John, your music is really great but please go easy on the pricing!

I tried hunting for apartments from time to time but I couldn't find a great deal. Most one bedroom houses in the area have shot up to $1600+ thanks to a new school across the street and the influx of recent graduates from various universities. I remember the good old days when I used to split a two bedroom apartment and pay $700 in rent. Went for a bike ride around the area in the evening. And finally watched parts of Office Space. I love it... Every time you watch it, you have gained more experience and you start relating even more to all the problems in the movie. I hope I don't have to see a round of layoffs like those guys. There are always pessimists out there... many predictions of slowing growth in the semiconductor industry. Don't know what to make of it.

2007-05-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

Postcards from California

2007-05-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

Another one from the Land of Cubes

I have noticed one very odd thing about living in the land of cubes. You go to the restroom in the morning and you bump into a person, say your customary "Hey X!" and then move on. Few hours later, nature calls and it's deja vu "Heeeyyy XX!?"! You bump into the same person again after another few hours, a third time in the same day. This seems to point to some natural law of restroom breaks. There is some default periodicity that we are all set to. I know you're going, "Too much Information!" at this point, so I shall stop right here. I just wanted to be the first one to propound some natural law.

A new phenomenon at work these days is the attrition. For the last few months, one person I know is leaving the company every month. Some send very poetic farewell messages. One of the most recent had the subject line "So long and thanks for the fish!", alluding to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! Some leave for Motorola in Illinois, some leave for start-ups close by. Some invite everyone to the Indian buffet close by called Mayuri for lunch. Today my immediate next-door neighbour (Buttons' master Philip if you read one of my posts about canines in the Cubeland) left the company after working for 5 years. Somehow I feel sad even though I didn't really talk to Philip a whole lot in the 2.5 years that I have been here. Are all these smart people the mice on the sinking Titanic? (the last two people were graduates of MIT and the one before of the U of I) I know there are some big unknowns in the future outlook of the company a few years down the line, but I don't know if it warrants a move right now.

At dinner at the cafeteria today, it felt nice to talk to my co-worker friends. The conversation as usual drifts from one thing to another. Today the highlight was the discussion about "The Bay 2 Breakers". It is a race in San Francisco, where people run from the Bay to the Breakers, a distance of roughly 7 miles. R and P went to the race in the City over the weekend. Apparently there were a lot of drunk people, dressed in various costumes, or not dressed at all. There were tonnes of anecdotes they shared. The most interesting ones were about the deluge of blonde Paris Hilton look-a-likes, dressed in prison jumpsuits. And then there were some people who ran the race upstream, calling themselves (and presumably dressed like) salmons because they ran in the wrong direction.

The way back on the bike was slightly chilly but I found a less busy albeit longer route to get home. And when I came back a beautiful sunset welcomed me home. Park rangers they say are paid in sunsets. I defintely got a bonus today:

2007-05-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

Booyah Oil Money!

About a year and a half ago I saw the price of gas rise by a huge amount during the record hurricane season of 2005, the season that included Hurricane Katrina, the season the weatherman ran out of letters to name his storms. I wagered that as global warming would only get worse, the hurricane season in 2006 would be just as bad and so it is as good as a cinch that oil stocks would rise. After some elementary research and falling prey to Jim Kramer's stupid advice, I bought some shares of Valero (Stock Ticker : VLO)

Luckily for the Gulf states, 2006 was a very mild hurricane season. Unfortunately for me with all the talk of litigation against oil companies for their huge profits, Dubya's speech of America "Addicted to Oil", Valero had a very bad run in 2006. So the stock tanked and went way lower than the value I bought it at. I was kicking myself for making my dumb prediction, but I decided to weather the storm and hold on to VLO. While my personal stock market storm was in full fury, I always filled gas at a Valero station close by. I probably owned one small part of some gas station anyways... I mentally decided it would be the pump at the station close to 101 in Santa Clara.

This summer though Valero has done very well. The stock went from $50 to roughly $75. So out of my winnings I bought a new bike from a bike shop close by called "Off Ramp". It is a 20 inch tall mountain bike from a company called Giant. I have decided that I am going to commute with a bike from now on. It will save money on gas, give me regular exercise, and help reduce my personal carbon footprint as well, 3 birds with one stone... Work is just a 20 min ride from home. I even did a dry run of the same today and loved it. It sure does feel great to create some renewable energy out of gas. Here is a picture of my bike:

2007-05-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

Coaster-Phobia

This weekend was fun. R organized a trip to Six Flags with his friends from Intel, Sacramento. So A S R and I went to Vallejo to spin on some rollercoasters. My last trip to Six Flags was in 2003, when a bunch of us UW grad-students went to the Six Flags in Gurney, close to Chicago. I had an awesome time back then and I enjoyed nearly all the rollercoasters. The Vertical Velocity coaster freaked me out initially, but I finally mustered some courage and even sat through that one.

I wonder if it was peer pressure the last time. This trip to Six Flags I didn't really enjoy the rollercoasters as much. I don't like that sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you fall fast. I did try out all but a couple of the rollercoasters. I loved the coaster called Boomerang though. It consists of two parallel rails interconnected with some twists and the train goes from one rail to the other and back. You are completely disoriented midway through the ride and falling in reverse is an interesting experience. One of these green coaster with a huge drop at the start, just scared me a little too much. There was also some of that "Final Destination" effect. I am alluding to the rollercoaster accident in the movie, in which a lot of people are saved from death due to girl's premonition and then the Grim Reaper hunts them down all the same in some sequence. That movie must be the least favourite movie for the owners of Six Flags I bet.

The prices for various victuals at Six Flags are just atrocious. A bottle of water for instance was for $3.60. Hot chocolate was cheaper at $2.00. I think it is just inhuman to charge so much for water. They are just waiting for some people to die of dehydration. Well I almost did, but then finally got myself some hot chocolate when I was almost on the brink.

To conclude, I think I am out of the coaster-crazy phase of my life. Yeah I am a senile 27-year old I guess. I just don't see the point of paying someone to torture me, first with the sinking feeling in my stomach and then with overpriced food. I enjoyed making new friends and hanging out with some of my older friends. That's something I ought to do more often.

2007-05-09T17:11:00.001-07:00

Referring to an article from BBC News posted here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6640147.stm

Quote:

Few of those flying today, though, know what all this will mean in terms of pollution and carbon emissions. "I'm not thinking about all that right now," said Anita Gupta as she arrived to catch her flight to Mumbai. "How it impacts the environment is difficult to grasp," added Anjali, as she queued at the security gate.

Danesh, a businessman, was the only person we found who was concerned. "All these additional planes being added to the system,
and the fuel being emitted, causing more warming is very hazardous," he said, "but I am still flying because I have to for my job."

For now, India's priority is a massive programme of building: half a dozen new international airport terminals, new runways, new infrastructure. Worrying about the environmental cost will come later.

I have never seen this question asked to anyone in the US. On an average day there are probably 100 times more planes flying to various places within the US. I admit air travel has a huge effect on carbon emissions, but has anyone ever asked America to reduce aviation because it isn't good for the environment. Heck why doesn't America just stop using planes altogether because airplanes were invented here and they have had a hyperactive aviation business for the last century.

2007-05-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

An Attempted Environment-Friendly Weekend

The weekend reports here are inspired by Hob, who writes similar weekend updates. Friday night was fairly ordinary. I realized that very frequently I tend to not do things in ways that I know best. So for starters I decided to become very environment-friendly and reduce my personal carbon footprint. Friday night I went grocery shopping with a cloth bag and walked to the store about a half mile away rather than driving. I shopped for really healthy things, such as whole wheat pitas, hummus, organic milk, sundried tomatoes, walnuts and olive oil/balsamic vinegar. Unfortunately at the checkout line I forgot to hand my cloth bag to the person packing the bags, so I ended up using some plastic bags inside my cloth bag. Lessson learned and now I know another way "a bulb cannot be made" (Quoting Edison on optimism). And I came back home and enjoyed all the healthy goodies. I highly recommend the Athenos Hummus, if you are in the market for some Mediterranean food.

On Saturday morning I went to watch Spiderman 3 with Alok, Mani, Atul, Sathish and Raj. The movie was decent, but lacked a cohesive storyline. (It seems to have broken records of the highest opening weekend numbers.)We went for Indian food at Spice Hut in Sunnyvale thereafter. I turned vegetarian two weeks ago and I was feeling pretty happy about it. Also given the news that chicken feed containing the melamine (that killed many pets) has entered the food-chain, it seems like a good move already.

The other big way to reduce my carbon footprint would be to start biking to work. So I decided to shop for bikes at Walmart. I got completely confused by all the options and eventually ended up not getting one. But I bought an energy-efficient bulb for about $2 from GE. The lamp is subsidized by PG&E and also uses 13 watts to emit the same amount of light as a 60 watt bulb. (1/4th the electricity consumption is quite something!) Usually I hate the light from these substitutes because it tends to be ugly white, but surprisingly these ee-bulbs give out light with the warm yellow hue that I love. It seems pretty ironic to me that things that we usually assume as signs of progress are actually very short-sighted. For instance, cars, bulbs, electricity, medicine. All things that define progress of technology, but all things that actually cause more serious problems such as global warming, overpopulation... Frankensteins that were conceived many years ago and now taking birth. A lot of organizations have started demanding manufacturers to do a life-cycle analysis of their products, which is a step in the right direction.

I had read a review for Mohammed Yunus's "Banker to the Poor" by Hirak on Friday, so I picked up the book at Borders on the way back home. I couldn't let go off the book for the remainder of the night. I was already impressed with Yunus's micro-lending concept when I heard about it a few years ago. Reading about the other challenges Grameen Bank faced and how they solved them, inspired me even further. All in all a weekend that made me happy! :)

2007-05-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

Que Sera Sera

I wish Conan O'Brien had telecast today's show back when I was younger in India. Conan has been in San Francisco this week, and on today's show he visits Intel in Santa Clara. (As a matter of fact the very building he visits is about a mile from my home.) He wades through a sea of grey, grey as far as the eye can see and cubes completely indistinguishable from one another. The people who are guiding him through the place keep quiet for most parts, while he cracks lots of jokes about the place and how every cube is the same and nobody has any individuality.

While the company I work with is pretty nice, it is similar to Intel in many respects. I sit in a sea of cubes surrounded by identical green-brown walls. Everyday I spend 8 hours or more in a cube staring at a couple of monitors, writing emails, looking at waves and Verilog and C code. Is this what life is all about? Spending the years until you retire, making one chip after another work? There are a lot of advantages to it of course. It pays pretty well, you get to live in a beautiful warm place like Santa Clara, you get to drive a nice car, live in a nice apartment and have super weekends. Some of the chips I worked on are out in the market as well, and the bits I worked on could help you watch a HD-DVD or Blue Ray Disc on your computer. My manager is a really kind person and I own my company's quick moving stock. You do feel happy about being a productive member of society and paying taxes. (Okay actually taxes don't make me happy. ;)) I guess we are very privileged in some sense. There are people who are much worse off, who have no running water or food or a shelter. But somehow after doing this for 2 years, there is a certain hollowness I feel about this. Will I be doing this for the rest of my life?

I wanted to become an astrophysicist as a child. I grew up thinking science is the most wonderful thing we have, and how making a small contribution of my own would be a worthwhile way to spend life, and yet will be fun. When one is younger, in the age of ambition and dreaming, you want to make a difference to the world. You want your life to have some meaning... you have faith in the fact that you can do great things. You do well in school and are encouraged by your teachers into thinking you're a reasonably smart kid. But somehow this life now seems like an anticlimax. Your teachers didn't tell you that there are soo many smart people in the world. After arriving here, the road ahead really doesn't have milestones or signs. As a kid you have exams to prepare for, classes to try to ace, degrees to get, professions to choose and there is a huge realm of possibility ahead. What I find sorely missing in my life now is passion and a sense of higher purpose! Maybe one cannot have one's cake and eat it too afterall!

2007-05-03T20:55:00.000-07:00

Conan Live in San Francisco: What's inside those coffee mugs on the show?

I've been a fan of Conan O'Brien's Late Night show for sometime. It used to be my regular before-bed ritual back when I was on the Central Timezone, when I went to Graduate School in Madison, WI. Lately though staying up until 1230-1 am before work everyday on the Pacific Time Zone is just no doable. I do catch every other show on Friday night, and it brings back fond memories. Conan is a pretty gifted comedian. I am sure he saw it coming... from Harvard lampoon, to Simpsons to Saturday Night Live, Conan has contributed to a wide range of classic comedy. (Okay I admit I know nothing about the Harvard Lampoon)

Today though was an interesting day to get to see a show taped live in front of you. So what were the things that struck me most? A) The stage/set is soo small. One imagines it to be much larger than it is. The band is playing along one wall of the stage using as little area as possible. Seven people cramped against one wall while the rest of the show proceeds in the middle. In the smallness regard, the set shares this feature with the White House. The real White House is sooo tiny when compared to the impression of it that you get from TV pictures. B) They pour water into those coffee mugs. Yeah they do! I saw them do it. C) Conan is a pretty sweet guy overall... if some kid is waving like crazy during the commercials, he waves back nicely acknowledging the wave. D) The Orpheum Theater was pretty grand and seats a lot of people too. All the more challenging for Conan because it is hard to get a show on, with so many excited fans all shouting from various corners of the theater, trying to get heard on national television. Yeah I know it's pretty lame to do that. E) The Max Weinberg 7 is technically around to entertain the people during the breaks and to play the opening and closing music on the show. But seems like their major role was for the breaks. F) Various parts of the set are rolled in and rolled out onto the stage during the show. For instance, the couch and desk for the interviews are brought in this way. The band that plays it's own music, gets their instruments dragged in similarly.

It took some amount of time to stand in the lines, get tickets etc. You do feel slightly special that you got tickets in the beginning, until you realize there are a zillion other people who got tickets too. Randy Jackson was one of the guests on the show tonight. Overall though Thursday night shows are generally alright, nothing noteworthy. So you get a few laughs, you get to hear some decent music and before you know it the show is over and you are back home writing a blog post about it. :)

2007-04-30T23:55:00.001-07:00

An ode to Jon Stewart

A minor flop at the box office last year, "Man of the Year" was a movie starring Robin Williams about a TV show host who runs for the presidency and wins. If had to pick one TV personality to become the leader of the Free World (quoting Obama), it would be Jon Stewart. Exceptional comic timing, great facial expressions, and a remarkable wit already make him the best in the business even if he had no other notable quality. I truly wonder if the person who wrote the script for "Man of the Year" had Jon Stewart in mind. Jon's talents though don't end there.

Fearless and outspoken, he doesn't steer clear of controversial topics but takes them head on, asking some of his more political guests all the tough questions, that the rest of the shows tiptoe around. The Daily show relishes in poking fun at the various contradictions of the Bush government. One of the best examples of such satire was a piece from last week entitled "Bush vs Bush", where Daily Show pitches GW Bush of the second term against GW Bush from the first term in the White House. My favourite line was the one following both Bushes warning America of deadly consequences if America doesn't invade Iraq before and recently if America leaves Iraq now.

"So let me get this straight, first term President Bush went in to remove Saddam Hussein, and second term President Bush you are there to battle the threat created by the LACK of Saddam Hussein."

Juxtaposing statements from the same person about similar issues shows the hypocrisy of the administration.

It is said that a vast majority of young America gets their news from the Daily show, and it definitely doesn't seem like a responsibility that Jon takes lightly. I cannot think of any other show that has a discussion about a book. It seems like a conscious decision to put the sex appeal back into books. Mr Stewart seems to use his fame to good use too. Attacking Tucker Carlson about the quality of television journalism was just one such example. My vote (if I had one) to President Stewart!

2007-04-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

Question: What is the biggest sign that America hates George W Bush?
Answer: The frontrunners in the Presidential race today are a woman and a black male Democrat.

2007-04-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

Carpe Diem Reloaded

After having a complete blast last weekend, by going to Mission Peak in Fremont and then to the Rosicrucian Egyptian museum in San Jose, I decided to do the Carpe Diem theme again this weekend, although may be not quite as successfully.

Friday

On Friday night, I went for an excellent movie, Fracture starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. This one is a suspense drama with an excellent storyline. I was pleasantly surprised that this turned out to be such a good movie. The process of measurement spoils the quantity being measured though... the Heisenberg principle as applied to movies... my contention is that since I have told you that this was an excellent movie, you visit the theaters with greater gusto and then realize that it wasn't so great afterall. Not a lot of movies are theater-worthy but I did have a good time with this one. Anthony Hopkins did what he does best... act as a smart rich villian. Ryan Gosling's role as the protagonist made me realize something very significant. I realized that success cannot be measured by money, by possessions, by your achievements, by other people's judgement of your worth... personally I think a true measure of success is self-respect. Real success I think is living up to one's own standards in pursuing one's goals and earning one's own respect.

Saturday

I dabbled in photography again. I learnt how to use Sai's Nikon D200 and then took a few pictures in the lawns outside within Mansion Grove. Here is one of the pictures testing D200's depth of field.

A friend A is moving to London in a few months from now and her brother S organized a party in Palo Alto. It was at this swanky place called "The Mantra Lounge", which is probably the most sophisticated place with an Indian theme I had ever been to. They had paintings by MF Hussain on the walls, a very fancy decor and some very fine Riesling.

Sunday

Today some friends A & M, invited me to lunch and then we went checking out condominiums in the area. Milpitas had some for around 300,000 dollars but these were 30 years old and right next to 680. Then I found some brand new condos close to home for around 500,000 dollars with a brand new primary school in the area. I don't think I really am in the market for a place yet, but it was good fun checking out prices. Half a million dollars is a lot of money!

Looking forward to seeing Conan Live in San Francisco this week. I got tickets for the recording. :)

2007-04-22T18:14:00.000-07:00

Carpe` Diem - Postcards from San Jose

2007-04-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

The man, the machine... Street Hawk!

On my trip to India this time, one of my best friends from childhood Priyadarshan took me out to a place called "Mocha" for dinner. I loved the place! One of the few meals which were blog-worthy. The crowd around us mostly comprised of "hep" kids from Symbiosis college, the local place for youngsters with rich parents. We looked like the oldest people in the place, and with my impending wedding, I was soon to enter the age of uncle-hood. It was a much more upscale version of a hookah place in Austin that Suvid once took me to, and with great Indian food to boot. And so the atmosphere was exotic to say the least. One sits on the floor with large cushions. The place is dimly light, some smoke, psychdelic colors, other-worldly music... the only thing missing was a belly-dancer. I felt transported to another country. And then there was the menu... In India people don't care about calories. They just relish their food and leave guilt for Americans. And so I had some amazing coffee, and kheema paav (Mumbai ishtyle) and a few more things I can't recall. The prices were totally not Indian. Priyu spent more than I spend on an average meal in the valley that night in absolute numbers.

Priyu also had a neat phone with a camera and the theme from Street Hawk, a childhood favourite for both of us. It took me back to a much simpler time, when TV stood for Doordarshan and it was pretty sucky. There were usually only a couple of decent shows all week. One used to be "The World this Week" which was a top-class journalism effort hosted by Pranoy Roy. I don't think I've seen a comparable news show, even later, although I have to admit that my outlook on the world was a lot different around age 10.

And then there was Street Hawk. I knew when it would show, and there were no advertisements, just pure fun! It was every kid's dream to become a crime-fighter and ride a cool fast bike. Today I visited this site and it brought back such pleasant memories, of a time long gone, yet a memory worth cherishing. Street Hawk was cancelled in the United States within 13 episodes. Somehow even though I watched some Knight Rider later, it was no match for Street Hawk. If you are someone from my generation who shared this liking for Hyper Thrust and the man with a machine, do visit this place. Priyu actually rides like Mr Mach on his spanking new Karisma. I am happier without riding one though... dont have the guts to even sit as a pillion rider now. :)

2007-03-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

The TV Buying Dilemma : My Decision Making Process

TV Buying is a nightmare scenario. The number of options that one has not just for technology, sizes, manufacturers and retailers, make decision making very hard. I got past all the initial technology related understanding LCD, Plasma, CRT, Projection and others. I have talked to a sizable number of people who own TVs and each one recommends getting a kind unlike their own. Joseph says,"I bought an LCD TV from Samsung 2 years ago, and some important component went kaputt. Buy Plasma TV!" Nachiket says "My friend bought a Plasma TV. They don't last very long. Don't get Plasma!" So I decided I am going to get an LCD TV, under $1000 in price.

I worked on video processors for the next generation standards, so I know about the latest high resolution DVDs that have come out. Blue Ray DVDs and HD-DVDs both have a resolution of 1920 x 1088 pixels. This is called 1080p or Full HD resolution I think. Also if you watch NBC Nightly News you would know that their broadcasts switched to Full HD from last week. Comcast HD also broadcasts at that resolution. So it seems like all broadcasters are switching to that resolution. If you spend a $1000 on a TV, you better buy something that plays 1080p.

But that as much as I can tell is an impossible proposition. There are no such TVs in the market currently. The cheapest 1080p TV is the Sharp Aquos 32 inch TV from Buy.com or Circuit City. The trouble is that it is over my budget. It costs around $1400. So I think the smart thing to do is to get the cheapest decent TV money can buy, and wait until 1080p TVs are within my budget. That seems like a 20 inch Tube by Philips from Walmart for around $200. I need a good second opinion that my thinking here makes sense. Any takers?

2007-03-13T23:39:00.000-07:00

It's raining cats and dogs

There's been a deluge of dogs at work these days. Within a one cube radius of my cube today, there were three dogs. A neighbour I share the aisle with, gets his really cute but old dog called Buttons to work. Then last week a new neighbourette moved in with her Apso. The third dog, a dachshund, is the one in the cube one aisle away, which I share a wall with. As a dog lover, I couldn't be more pleased. Canines are just too cute, and because at least one member of my family always hates them, some pleasures are best enjoyed vicariously.

Buttons has been coming to work for most of last month. Our workplace has a policy of "welcoming obedient pets" and all of these dogs fit the bill. Very rarely does one hear one of the dogs bark, although you do hear them lapping up water, or squealing from boredom. Poor Buttons keeps staring at passers by and I pet her and smile at her everyday. My neighbour gets a walk every few hours. Sitting in a small cube all day is not good for anyone's health and Buttons ensures that her master gets some exercise.

I've heard that Google takes pet friendliness a step further. They actually buy a pet for employees who sit next to each other and want a dog. The company takes care of it, feeds it and drills a hole in the cube walls so that the cuddly creature can visit everyone. The poor human beings stare at code all day. Well if that's what it takes to become Fortune's top company to work for, I say let all employers buy us pets.

2007-03-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

Zodiac : A Review

I was utterly and totally scared as I made my way back home last night after 11 pm. I came back home with a person on the phone for moral support, and then quickly turned on all the lights at home and made a quick inspection of every room. The reason was this: An intelligent serial killer once roamed the same Northern California streets that I tread on today. The murders he committed some of the most ghastly crimes in the area. What's more even after 37 years , no one has yet confirmed with certainty the identity of this monster.

No movie house would have dared to make a movie about the Zodiac killer for many years. An accurate depiction of the killer would most likely have spooked Bay Area residents to the hilt... Paramount allowed David Fincher to make such a movie, and I cannot imagine a higher compliment to the movie-makers than my reaction to the movie last night.

**SPOILER WARNING** **ANALYSIS**

So why was the Zodiac Killer never caught? Here is my take on this based on the facts presented by the movie:

- The lack of a motive. The murderer just killed people to taunt police officers.

- Zodiac probably also understood that every case in a different county gets treated by different police authorities. In a less wired world, information sharing between the cops from various counties wasn't efficient and well-coordinated. Some of the Bay Area counties didn't even have fax machines at the time.

- The creation of ciphers. This was merely a distraction. The police would spend a lot of time and energy on trying to solve the ciphers, and really not gain any useful information. This meant they had less time to actually connect the dots.

- Claiming crimes that he didn't commit. This again I believe was a way to waste the police's time.

- Pretense of attack on bus for school children. Terrorizing San Francisco and forcing the police to spend time on checking all buses instead of solving the crime.

I think Zodiac was smarter than most police officials thought. But that intelligence could have been put to better use in other more useful purposes for humanity.

2007-03-05T16:15:00.000-08:00

Amche Pune Revisited

Last month I visited Pune again after two and a half years. It is always super to be back home. I had been forewarned about a slew of changes to my old city. Hard to miss are all the new shopping malls. We live on S B Road, so only a blind person would not notice them. The malls are all very fancy, some even fancier than the ones in the US, with much the same merchandise. Pyramid and Benzer on S B Road were my usual hangouts, when I needed to do most of my wedding-gear shopping. (I also got married on this trip to my classmate from COEP, Sai Hingne! : )) Clearly inflation is a huge problem in India today. Nearly everything at these malls is comparable in absolute amounts to clothes one buys in America. Some positive changes that I saw around me were the humongous flyovers, such as the one on University Road. Some positive changes in the making are causing a lot of Punekars a lot of heartburn nevertheless.

The road/traffic situation is easily the biggest problem. While I never tried to plough my way through rush hour traffic, when I did get stuck in places, I was reminded that gridlocks are common in all major metros... I've driven through some in San Francisco and Chicago as well. But what I disliked the most was the lack of fear of the law among educated people too. At every signal, people habitually break the red light. Without cops to extract fines and with the fines now becoming a measly fraction of the average person's paycheck, people have absolutely no regard for traffic rules. City planning is my other major gripe with the city. City officials just keep extending already clogged roads further up-stream, without caring about the fact that traffic is virtually at a stand-still during every rush-hour down-stream. Plans for new complexes in places like Pirangute should only be approved once many alternate ways of getting from there to the heart of the city are created. Pune desperately needs a subway system atleast from Kothrud to Deccan and Laxmi Road Areas.

One other uniquely Pune-sque feature is the excavation of roads at random. In my 4.5 years in the US and other visits to Bombay, Delhi, and other cities, I have never noticed this problem elsewhere. I don't know why people need to replace these huge cement pipes or lay telephone lines again and again. And it doesn't even seem like anyone is in a particular hurry to get the mess sorted out. The mud is left lying around on the street, without anyone working on clearing it up even after 5 pm. I saw a person on a scooter, running into one such obstruction and suffering a very bad fall.

But here is a list of all the positive things I found on my trip: the inexpensive yet stylish clothes from FabIndia, a night's stay at Le Meridian in Pune, (11 on 10 on all counts. Excellent hotel. Highly recommended! Highly overpriced though) and my flights on Jet Airways to Delhi. The Pune airport was a fairly decent experience and a first class flight on Jet Airways nicer still. There were 7 passengers in the cabin and 3 attendents looking after them. Food is excellent, the attendants polite, and flights were on-schedule. Also there were no blackouts all through my stay. Admitted it was winter and electricity requirements were lower, but it felt nice. While there are huge mounds of mud to conquer, there is hope!

2007-01-06T02:57:00.000-08:00

Who killed the Newspaper?

"Video killed the radio star." - The Buggles

For the last few months, someone has been delivering the San Jose Mercury News to my Santa Clara home. I don't know why. I have tried emailing them and asking them to not deliver the newspaper but they insist on continuing their unwanted altruism. I wonder how they reconcile with the fact that I am not a paying. And it's not like I read the newspaper either... someone or the other picks it or drops it into the trash.

Which brings me to the premise of this post... Why has the newspaper become so unwanted these days (so much so that I won't even read it for free)? The Mercury News isn't the best thing on the newspaper stand, but in many respects their coverage of the Silicon Valley's high-tech industry is unrivalled. Newspapers try to inform their consumers about the local news, weather, sports, schools, job market... the keyword here being LOCAL. But for a 26-year old foreign high-tech worker in California, weather is never a concern given the mildness of it. Sports hardly impresses... who cares what the Stanford Cardinals/Oakland Raiders/SF Giants/49ers are upto?? Don't need a new job right now, and even if I do it looks like the headhunters are finding me faster than I need jobs. In a wired world where people are close to their computers nearly all their waking hours, all these things can be checked for free, updated real time and from many competing sources. Craigslist and Ebay stole the classifieds business from the newspapers, and Monster Jobtrak the jobs search market.

The final nail in the coffin was struck by President Bush's war on terror. If you track the most emailed stories on any of the news websites, the Iraq related headlines are never something anyone emails to anyone else. These newspapers executives should learn about Shannon's Information Theory, known to most EE or CS grads, says that the information content of any piece of information is inversely proportional to the probability of it's occurrence. Clearly "50 dead in Baghdad" is a very deplorable incident, but doesn't really add to anyone's knowledge of the world at large... Minus the few people in the White House, everyone knows that Iraq is in a civil war and given the 3000 civilian deaths in the last few years, the last resort of fools is to just contest the definition of a "civil war". Dilys voiced the same opinion recently about news as a pessimistic world view, where bad incidents make the frontpages faster than good ones.

And finally a plug for the New York Times. I love reading it online! The Times gets it... no pop-ups, no weird banners, most emailed/blogged articles, stories that contain fun information... Tonight I read the following excellent news-stories:

San Franciscans hurl their rage at the Parking Patrol

First-Baby Sweepstakes Fuels Immigration Debate

Seeking Big Payoff, Companies Pay Dearly for Tech Trade Show

Job Growth Is Strong, Surprising Economists

2007-01-02T23:14:00.000-08:00

Sunny California : Where everyday is Earthquake season!

"The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away"

So presumably goes a line in the Bible. It refers to how someone blessed with plenty, is also hobbled with some negatives. California is no exception. The great weather, the high-tech industry, the vineyards, Hollywood, the movie-star Governator (maybe the Lord was confused on that one) all great things, but the Lord taketh away by putting plenty of faults into our Northern California backyards. My roommate reminded me of those and my own lackadaisical attitude towards them yesterday. He asked me to read this page and it literally scared the living daylights out of me. Try it yourself here.

Joel, my room-mate told me about the Loma-Prieta earthquake, and how the road we walked on in San Francisco on New Year's eve, was built after the 1989 quake. The website above reminds me to do a lot of preventive things to avoid problems during an earthquake, describes what happens during one typically. It talks about how shattered glass is all around and how you ought to sleep every night with shoes tied to the side of your bed. So as I lay in bed last night I realized that my bed was right beneath a window. I wouldn't want to be cut right through by the shattered glass and immediatly I moved my bed to the opposite wall of the room.

Still uneasy from the seismic wake-up call, I started reading the Wikipedia about the Loma-Prieta earthquake as well. It referred to a funny prediction made by a reporter about the Baseball World Series game in the City at the time. (The two big Northern California teams Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants were going head to head.) But there was another person who works for the US Geological Survey, Jim Berkland, who also got this prediction right. In fact he even wrote an article about it in the Gilroy Dispatch. Here is his site. Jim seems to be making a small busines out of the quake predictions. You can subscribe to his newsletter about quake predictions. It seems the US government has warned him not to make any more predictions to avoid mass panic (I don't know how he reconciles both the last two claims). I know what site I am going to check every week now.

2006-12-21T20:42:00.000-08:00

The price is right! : On the health of individuals and corporations

I fell ill today and I bought myself a bottle of Dayquil from Safeway for the flu. This was the first time in my 4.5 years in the US that I bought over-the-counter medication for the flu. My parents who are both doctors back in India usually give me enough prescription medication along, that I never need to go out and buy anything in the market. Today though I paid about 20 times the price of paracetamol in India for basically the same chemicals in the US. Given purchasing power parity differences it might not be a very bad deal but it makes you wonder about some things.

How does one decide what the correct price for something is? I am guessing in the capitalistic sense, the right price is the price that consumers are willing to spend. It is the price that will drive up the stock price of the pharmaceutical company. Of course a sick person, is more worried about his immediate concern the flu, more than the gouging that the retailers or the pharmaceutical companies are happily involved in. If someone is unwell, he buys the medicine regardless.

Which is probably also why doctors make so much money here as well. I've heard that an average doctor makes roughly 200,000 dollars at the start of his career. Now the excuse that is given is that they have to pay their way through grad school and college. So because the universities are gouging them, they have every right to gouge you right back. So basically what arises out of this is a society of mutual stealing.

Now I guess it is a totally subjective thing whether you feel like the price for something is right or wrong. For someone who grew up in a poorer version of India, everything seems like gouging I guess. But maybe the Fed sees things the way I see them and hence is trying to control inflation.

2006-12-20T00:41:00.001-08:00

The Power of Beauty

A well-known quiz question goes "What is the unit of a woman's beauty?", the answer to which is one milli-Helen. It compares the beauty of a woman X to that of Helen of Troy, for whom legend has it, a 1000 ships sailed. In my personal opinion, although it makes for a very fancy quantification of beauty, that even manages to tickle one's funny bone, in reality it is a completely useless measure. Even the prettiest women of our times, for instance Penelope Cruz (personal opinion) or Demi Moore (a friend's personal opinion), may rate 0 on the Helen scale. The prettiest woman in Indian legend might be Mumtaz-mahal for whom the Taj Mahal was erected, but for the lack of a major naval fleet, Shah-Jahan may not have been successful at accentuating her Helen score. If only he had read the Illiad.

Another legendary beauty of our times without a doubt was Princess Diana. While the measure of beauty I am about to suggest further in this post is harder to quantify as elegantly as a Helen, Princess Diana definitely calls for a new definition of the unit of beauty.

I saw a movie today called "The Queen" which although slightly longish, tries to present a balanced story of what happened after the death of Princess Diana. Here are my two cents. While I think most people are inherently nice there are always two sides to any story. Some versions of events stay within the close walls of a palace , while others are more openly expressed.

What do I think of Princess Diana? I think she sounds like a wonderful person based on her actions. She seems to have realized the power of her own beauty and harnessed it to further some very worthy causes. But there is a certain problem in dealing with such people of exceptional beauty.

One thing strikes me as a very interesting phenomenon on Orkut. If you try to analyze the sexiness, coolness, trust-worthiness ratings of people on Orkut, I have noticed that usually these values tend to have some correlation. It is extremely rare that very pretty people are rated badly on coolness and trust-worthiness. While it could be true that being pretty, might put a rosy spin on whole lives and hence cause people to be genuinely good... or for trust-worthiness and coolness to make people more attractive. I think an equally probable (or more likely) explanation is that people tend to assume the best about good-looking people. Very often they get the benefit of doubt in ambiguous situations, they bring out the sympathies in fellow human beings, move up the ladder faster, get richer spouses...

None of us know whether Princess Diana was completely without fault in her relationship with the Royal family, but the press and general public always assume so. The power of beauty also stands corruption if absolute. While actions speak louder than words, we all make mistakes. Mistakes after all are relative. One man's terrorist is another man's martyr as they say.

2006-11-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

Carter on Elections in Nicaragua and America

NPR conducted an interview with Jimmy Carter who is working as an observer for the elections in Nicaragua. The article is linked here:

What comes as a surprise to me are Carter's thoughts on the American election system:

But there's no doubt in my mind that the United States electoral system is severely troubled and has many faults in it. It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing. We require for instance that there be uniform voting procedures throughout an entire nation. In the United States you've got not only fragmented from one state to another but also from one county to another. There is no central election commission in the United States that can make final judgment. It's a cacophony of voices that come in after the election is over with, thousands or hundreds of lawyers contending with each other. There's no uniformity in the nation at all. There's no doubt that that there's severe discrimination against poor people because of the quality of voting procedures presented to them. Another thing in the United States that we wouldn't permit in a country other than the United States is that we require that every candidate in a country in which we monitor the elections have equal access to the major news media, regardless of how much money they have. In the United States, as you know, it's how much advertising you can by on television and radio. And so the richest candidates prevail, and unless a candidate can raise sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, they can't even hope to mount a campaign, so the United States has a very inadequate election procedure.

2006-10-29T15:53:00.000-08:00

The 25-hour day

Every year nearly all Americans are involved in a collective robbery. What's more it is completely legal and in fact officers of the law also partake in the loot. They all steal an hour from a day in April and use it on a day like today... October 29th 2006. There are a few exceptional states such as Arizona and Indiana, which rise above this apparent thievery that others call "Daylight Saving".

A pleasant windfall from this phenomenon though is a freak of nature, a 25 hour day. What does one do with an extra hour? Some dedicate it to what the bard calls "tired nature's sweet restorer".... in simple words, they doze off for an extra hour. Some others dedicate it to other pursuits typical of a Sunday morning.

So far though I have spent a wholly ordinary 25-hour day. Started my day with the radio quiz show called "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me!". If you have never listened to this NPR Radio Show, I highly recommend it. It is one of the funniest shows around and with the hilarious Dubya still ruling over the land, there is no dearth of jokes anyone can crack.

I also went to the IMAX Dome Theater in the afternoon for a movie about India called Mystic India. I didn't particularly like that movie and I won't recommend spending that extra hour trying to watch this movie. If you use my advice you've earned yourself an extra hour. All you readers owe me an hour's worth of pay now. ;) Paypal account = ....

2006-09-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

Returning from a hiatus?

Ennui took its toll on this blog (and blogger) for the past few months. My apologies to the regular visitors of my blog for this absence without forewarning or even an announced end. Writer's block is completely unplanned. I don't know whether this relates to my usual pessimism about certain things, but I think this blog is pretty ordinary. I don't think I am really adding anything very worthwhile to the blogosphere and equally my energies are probably better spent at other endeavours. I am probably capable of writing worthwhile stuff, but it would probably require me to make an excursion away from lazy-land or TV-land.

Part of the reason for this break was that I have been busier lately with the organization of an event alongwith other members of the COEP Foundation's Silicon Valley Chapter. I helped create this website for the event http://www.coepfoundation-svc.org which was held yesterday at SAP's cafe in Palo Alto. It was a success and was well-recieved by nearly everyone who attended.

I also got introduced to some very illustrious alumni from COEP in the Valley, including Ajit Nazre of the Kleiner Perkins fame. Some others whom I admire I forgot to approach, Nickhil Jakatdar being one of them. Sandeep Johri, a VP at HP who moderated the event, also did an exceptional job. It was a complete pleasure to hear the intelligent and funny remarks that each of the panelists had to make and I think the whole room probably left a little smarter. So the hiatus here was for a worthy cause.

2006-06-22T00:40:00.000-07:00

The Highest-Income Counties in the United States

I thought this was pretty interesting. Santa Clara county is among the places where people earn a lot of money. (10th on the median household income list). Wikipedia gives a list of the highest-income counties and many of the counties around Bay Area figure prominently on the list. I've heard from a lot of friends that the county North of Golden Gate is extremely rich and guess what it tops the list. San Mateo, Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties close by also feature in the rankings. I guess having so many engineers around helps these numbers.

Ofcourse that doesn't mean that the median-income people like myself would ever be able to afford a half million dollar home here. This post on the Monster Blog talks about a similar problem in another affluent county.

2006-06-21T00:38:00.000-07:00

A feeling called home

This weekend I went to this restaurant in Mountain View called Amber India Restaurant. In my honest opinion they have the best Indian lunch buffet in the Valley. Their selection includes pani-puri, bhel, kheer and many others. Everything tastes good despite their efforts to go easy on the greasy. It has been awarded an A grade by Zagat for the past many years and is consistently rated among the top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. Amber even serves shevayachi-kheer like my mother and occassionally soft warm gulab jamuns with just the right amount of sugar.

And my favourite part about visiting Amber... hearing my mother tongue at every other table. :) What is home afterall? Is it hearing the language that your mom spoke to you when you didn't speak any? Not to get overly Freudian, but could that be why you one is attracted to women who have features similar to one's mother? We are all seeking a feeling called home and the power of imprinting that they sing so many paens about in every Biology textbook (and the odd Tom and Jerry cartoon) may encourage us to create a home similar to our first home.

2006-06-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

As a kid I wanted to become a physicist. I always picked the physics books from the library and read about relativity, quantum mecahnics and these other difficult sciences all the time. I breathed and ate physics and astronomy. I even propounded a theory that went against the Big Bang Theory in class 10.(totally dumb in retrospect) An uncle of mine convinced me of the futility of pursuing it as a career and how some of the best astrophysicists don't get tenure positions and some other scary stories. Beyond that point it didnt really matter what else I decided to do. Electronics and Telecommunication was just my way of following the herd and jumping into the well because everyone before me had done the same. It was a really good decision though, because a lot of the most interesting science that has come about recently has been in computing and it allowed me to be close to all the action.

Most people at the Quiz Club back at COEP used to know me as the guy who loved Richard Feynman. And I truly did... As a teenager I used to love watching this program called Horizon on BBC. One of the shows was an interview with Richard Feynman, which introduced me to his extrordinary genius. I was completely bowled over by an analogy he gave comparing science and chess. The connection he drew was comparing the scientific process to sitting beside a chess board and observing the pieces without knowing any rules and then figuring them out. The interview was eventually converted into a book titled "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". The book though doesn't seem half as interesting as the real Feynman.

Today though I chanced upon the same show on Google Video and couldn't believe my good fortune. If you love science, you'd love this show. Check it out here.

2006-06-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

India Happening

My friend Vaibhav started a new venture online called India Happening recently. It is a social bookmarking site where you can share bookmarks about India. I have been visiting regularly and adding some bookmarks myself too, so do pay a visit and do the same as well.

My most recent bookmark was a recent article from Reuters about the recent rise of a coffee culture in India and how Starbucks probably missed out on a huge market that now has players like Barista and Cafe Coffee Day. You still cannot get Seattle's second best coffee in India. SBUX sucks! :)

Ofcourse there are other people who post some interesting bookmarks as well. One I liked was from Vaibhav... a story of an American born Indian girl's arranged marriage experiences from the New York Times. Also if you want to read more about American Born Desis you could try this other bookmark I posted a few weeks ago.

Do share some nice bookmarks with me soon... Happy Bookmarking! :)

At the Exploratorium

2006-06-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

Sculpture
Originally uploaded by Saket Jamkar.

Last weekend I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco with some of my friends. Do check out pictures from that visit by clicking on the picture. The Exploratorium is among the best science musuems I have been to. Initially we didn't plan on staying there for more than 2 hours but we all got so engrossed in all the fun experiments there, that we ended up staying until closing time. It is housed in the Palace of Fine Arts complex, a sight you would recognize from the song "Chunari Chunar" from Biwi Number 1. I admit that was a totally forgettable Bollywood musical minus that one song for me.

Also went to Ghirardelli Square... I was under the impression that Cannery Row was Ghirardelli's. The chocolate brownie ice-cream sundae was phenomenally good. If you happen to go to the city, definitely pay them a visit and enjoy the pure decadent indulgence. Obviates all the exercise you did for a week, but it's still worth it.

2006-06-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Exposing the Wine Snobs

Although I stay an hour away from Napa, I've never gone wine tasting. (There are reasons for that but I won't go into that for now.) What really got me started on wine was "Sideways". The protagonist in the movie likens himself to a Pinot grape as opposed to a Merlot, because the Pinot needs tender care and a perfect mix of environmental conditions to grow, while the Merlot thrives no matter how harsh the conditions. In fact the two title characters in the movie are modeled after the two varieties of grapes. Guess what happened after the movie, the sales of Pinot Noir sky-rocketed.

I used to be a wannabe wine connoisseur. Something I read today though made me rethink my desire to join the club. So to the funny article that made me lose my religion... "The Wine Snob Scandal". It talks about a PhD student Brochet who wrote a thesis entitled "Taste: A Study in the Representation of Chemical Substances in the Arena of Consciousness." Brochet played a devious game with all these wine-tasters who are probably paid a lot of money to get drunk. One experiment he tried was to give the tasters a white wine which evoked the standard responses of "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively". When he served the very SAME wine colored with a red tasteless dye the usual adjectives "intense, spicy, supple, deep" for red wines showed up in their descriptions. The same wine served from different bottles also produced different responses, playing on the biases of the tasters. If you don't know what these adjectives stand for and couldn't really sense a hint of cheese in that last bottle of Chardonnay, don't worry most of the experts don't seem know a whole lot either. Just sip away and fake it! "I sense a touch of strawberry... exquisite!"

2006-05-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

The road not taken

I shall be saying this with a sigh
Ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in the woods and I
Took the one less travelled by
And that's what has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost

The road not taken is among my favourite poems, and Robert Frost one of my favourite poets. The poem's beauty lies in the fact that you can read it like a half-full/half-empty glass. The optimist could derive a case for not following the herd and how it leads to success. The pessimist could assume that the sigh means that the choice made was wrong and led to an eventual failure. The beautiful co-existence of the yin and yang in the same lines is what increases this poem's appeal in my mind.

Ofcourse it makes me wonder about the next fork in my journey and what decision I will make. I am fairly happy with the way things are. Parents keep telling me that jobs are usually pretty boring and that all jobs tend to be of a repetitive nature. There are days when I am totally happy with everything that is going on in my life and others when I feel like I took a wrong turn in the road at some point and that I should make the next few turns so as to find my way back to that other road I didn't take. To be completely honest I haven't really chosen "a road not taken". My life has been about the beaten track for most parts, and that is a thing that worries me. In the Matrix Neo says when asked why he doesn't believe in fate "Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life". If I were able to predict in class 12 what I would be doing for the rest of my life that seems like a pretty boring life to me.

If life is to be measured by what one does over weekends I am living a full life. I hike regularly, read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies, try a lot of cuisines, travel some, love my music and TV.

2006-05-23T01:04:00.000-07:00

Google Pages

Do visit my Google Page to know more about me.
http://saketj.googlepages.com/

2006-05-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

Why Shawkeen?

Introducing my new blog called Shawkeen. http://shawkeen.blogspot.com

Indian population around the Bay Area is growing by leaps and bounds. The options for Indian food and others are increasing rapidly. While there are some review sites that rate restaurants around Silicon Valley, most of them aren't useful for Indian food lovers because our palates tend to enjoy higher spice levels more than others. There is also the search for the elusive Holy Grail of Indian cuisine, "The Perfect Butter Chicken" for some and the "The Perfect Dosa" for others.

The aim of this website would be encourage the top performers to achieve higher pinnacles of excellence and popularity. Also we want to help avoid any lunch or dinner disasters and encourage the wrecks to rise above their nadirs. So do come back for some reviews.

2006-05-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

This blog supports the Anti-Quota Movement

BBC News Article 1

BBC News Article 2

A little late but I am against the stupid politicians all the same. I don't even think there should be reservations at colleges like COEP. The percentages are a problem... 50% is too much. Add to that reservations for girls and you have a recipe for stupidity. Plaudits to the students at AIIMS!

2006-05-13T01:23:00.000-07:00

The IIT flu

A few days back Rahul Dabane, a friend of mine here gave me a digital copy of Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology". G H Hardy ofcourse is the famous Cambridge mathematician who discovered Ramanujan, the even more famous genius. Talking to Rahul and reading the book took me back to my high school days.

One of the major events in my life was M Prakash sir's Math Olympiad and IIT-JEE coaching class at Bhaskaracharya Pratisthana. I still recall the first time I met Prakash sir very distinctly. I was a tad shy of the requisite 90% score in class 10 mathematics but he asked me to solve some puzzle concerning the division of an angle whose vertex you couldn't access. I think I got the answer to that one and he let me into the Math class that summer. The class roster though was like the who's who of brilliant kids from all over Pune. Tejas Iyer, Dilys Thomas, Satyen Kale and many other geniuses I had vaguely known or seen at the Exploratory or from the NTS class and with whom I spent many hours at the class. Ofcourse most of the bright kids from that class ended up at IIT Bombay and then at some of the top American universities doing PhDs.

I hadn't gotten through NTS and hence I made a super-extra effort at the Regional Math Olympiad and managed to get selected for the Indian National Math Olympiad. That was probably one of the few times that I felt I have worked very hard for something. On most other occassions Ive never really been able to give my personal best. Ofcourse come INMO I slackened quite a bit and I think missed out on going to IMOTC as I recall because I didnt write "By Appolonius's Theorem" somewhere. I wasn't half as good as the rest of the kids who did go.

That done we had the JEE Math class by Prakash sir and if I was ever the worst student in any class, that was it. The 11th-12th days were a fairly topsy turvy rollercoaster ride for me for most parts. Crushes from those days used to be pretty debilitating, and I think one of those affected my performance at JEE for most parts. Another deal was that most of the smart kids at that class were soo far ahead and so brilliant, I used to consider the JEE an impossible goal. I was not focussed enough to qualify for JEE for sure but thankfully managed to get a respectable score on the HSCs although again nothing stellar.

Not getting through JEE was one of the biggest turning points in my life and I don't really know if I am a better person because of that. Would I have become a better engineer had I worked hard and somehow gotten in? How would my life have been different? Sometimes I think that going to the Math class there wasn't the best idea. It gave me such low self-esteem for so long that I never really realized that hardwork can make up for things and that some of these kids became smart because they had a huge head-start on all the problem solving approaches. It did bring this regret which I've only recently gotten over now because I think I eventually reached where I would have reached regardless of the intermediate path. I wasn't smart enough to go to EE at IIT without Kota style training, so being able to work on chip design was made possible purely because I went to COEP. The most important lesson I learnt was that, confidence in your abilities is one of the most important qualities one needs to have. Without it possible things become impossible and with it even some of the impossible things can become possible.

Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man.
But soon or late the man who wins,
Is the man who thinks he can.
- C. W. Longenecker

2006-05-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

Thank you for the music!

Pune was a pretty comfortable place to grow up. If there was one thing I was deprived of, it was quality Western music. My father is deeply into Indian Classical music and is a total nerd when it comes to music systems too. We had this fancy state-of-the-art 1980s Sony system with Dolby noise suppression that works fabulously even today. Rafi, Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhonsle were constant companions but not so much the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel. The only English cassette at home was from ABBA. If we lived in Bombay I'd have access to Times FM atleast but in Pune the only FM station was Akashwani.(BTW my home wireless network here is called Akashwani now. ;))

MTV was good when cable arrived on the scene for a little while and I was into all those latest fleeting wonders. But I'd never really heard or paid attention to any good music, the Floyds, U2s, the Police, Dylan... I used to love the "Retro Hour" on Radio Mirchi every night at 11pm... the one blue oasis in the desert sands of music mediocrity. Rehman ofcourse was great.

I think I've heard a lot of good music now thanks to MP3 technology, LimeWire (read Piracy :D), friends with good tastes, Classic Rock stations that abound in the US. I'd heard some of Alanis before but only recently did I download some and realize how much I like her. (Well I almost worship the ground she walks on!... well maybe not) But I adore her angry young woman style with meaningful lyrics... I love how I relate to her music whether it's the psuedo-ironic poetry in "Ironic", the anger at an ex-boyfriend from "You Oughta Know", her lovely voice from "Crazy"! So much so now that a pirate has turned into a convert. I want some Alanis on a CD now to play in my car. So you see even pirates can get reformed if good music beckons. Rock on!

2006-05-05T23:15:00.000-07:00

On Intelligence By Jeff Hawkins

Few people out there are as smart as Jeff Hawkins. So it is quite fitting that he is interested in researching the human mind. The objectives of this research are unique though. His objective is to learn the workings of the brain and apply this knowledge into creating better computers. Being a computer engineer myself, I find such work fascinating.

So why do I think Jeff Hawkins is wicked smart? Well just take a look at his background. He is the father of handheld computing; founded Palm Computing, where he invented the PalmPilot and Handspring, where he invented the Treo. Ofcourse after making a few hundred million dollars, he can afford to research brains on a full-time basis.

The book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins is a good read. My knowledge of biology is pretty sketchy for most parts and of neurobiology was as good as non-existent. So just learning the basics of brain physiology and anatomy was educational for most parts. The book also talks about the failures of the field of Artificial Intelligence and why the approach is wrong. Neural Networks, he says kind of started in the right direction but suffer from drawbacks such as not giving enough importance to feedback connections in the networks.

The neo-cortex is the top layer of the brain that developed most recently on the evolutionary scale. It consists of 5 layers with the large-scale analysis being done in the topmost layer and fine-grain analysis in the lowermost. This is where the signals from all our senses, get sensed. The basic function of this region is basically to store patterns and then matching new patterns to the stored patterns to identify or extrapolate from them. Based on his research of the neo-cortex, Jeff has founded another company called Numenta, that works on pattern recognition software and hierarchical memories.

I've been trying to find out university research groups that do similar research when I landed upon some excellent work by Kwabena Boahen at Stanford. His work was even featured in the Scientific American last year. The objective of his group being to produce silicon versions of parts of the brain, albeit very rough approximations. The power efficiency and coding efficiency of the human mind is almost impossible to mimic in today's technology.

2006-04-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

Big Bad Wolves and the Lure of Lucre

Everyday at work I overhear people in cubes around mine calling up the 1-800 numbers of credit card companies and cable TV companies and many others and complaining about some extra charge or another. Over the past year I've realized that big corporations with these fancy slogans and mission statements and ethics codes so completely lack scruples. I'm beginning to wonder if there is even one company that I can truly trust.

I don't understand why large corporations care about increasing profits at the cost of good ethics. I have umpteen examples of this, some of which I want to go over here, with the aim of warning other people about it.

Best Buy
My latest episode was with Best Buy. I bought a camera about 2 years ago and was sold a service plan alongwith it. The salesperson at the time claimed that no matter how tiny the problem with the camera, I could get a store coupon to buy something else at the store. Today when I went back to BestBuy to hopefully get a coupon to buy another camera, they told me that I don't have a replacement plan. So it only allows for the camera to be repaired but won't get a coupon or anything.

Comcast
I signed up for a Comcast high-speed internet connection with an online specials provider. I am sure it is a part of Comcast itself because they don't really care whether the special was actually applied. Instead of being billed 20$ a month, the bill shows up as 45$ a month. After repeatedly calling their numbers for 3-4 days I was asked to go with a copy of the order online to a local store. Comcast then claims that the printout doesn't mention anything about the deal, which was happily excluded by the ComcastSpecials provider.

Correction: Comcast did correct this situation after the phone calls and store visit.

Cingular
When you sign up they claim the plan is 39.99 per month. Later they dab on some additional charges... Universal Connectivity Fee, Federal XXX Charge and what not. These are not taxes but fees that Cingular takes from you because the Government takes it from them. How convenient, and because they have a few hundred of millions of customers, this means Cingular gets that much money more.

Credit Card Companies
Don't even get me started. They are a little better because they quickly remove charges when you call them, but other than that they take every opportunity to sneak some extra money out of your pocket.

Why do they stuff like this?
Here's what I think. Just to raise the company's stock value at any price.

What can we do?
Be really careful. Read everything. Keep good records. Beyond a point there is alternative but to fight and make a lot of noise.

2006-04-20T23:32:00.000-07:00

Sunnyvale, California India

Parimal calls Sunnyvale India. I don't blame him. There is a larger concentration of Indian people, Indian restaurants and Indian grocery stores here than India itself. Trust me I am not kidding! It is a sight to behold. This one complex on El Camino Real will just shock you out of your wits. It is as if you followed Alice through the looking glass and ended up on the opposite side of the globe. An ode to the businesses that you'll find next to each other here:

Lucky Dhaba - Basically a restaurant trying to make a quick buck off selling Indian food to the hungry single Indian engineers. Inside you get all the dishes commonly found at a Dhaba. What's more ZEE TV is playing in there on two flatscreen televisions, showing all the "K" letter serials you never wanted to see again, while a Punjabi uncle takes your orders in a gruff tone.

India Cash and Carry - The most successful desi grocery store around. Open according to one of the overworked cashiers at the store, 24 hours a day 365 days a year... well actually it's open only until 10 pm at night but that's quite an achievement in America. In there you'll find all things desi, utensils to Chavanprash to Hajmola, to Kulfi and Ladoos. You name it! Prices are wayy lower than other chain stores such as Safeway and Albertsons.

Raaga - Music stores, sells music CDs in all languages from Marathi to Telegu to Tamil to Hindi. I don't even know a store in Pune that could boast of such a collection. Ofcourse you can rent DVDs to the latest releases... Rang De Basanti!

Komala Vilas - Not an apartment complex but a South Indian food joint. Never been there, but been highly recommended by a South Indian friend as the place to get lunch. Apparently they have South Indian style thali with unlimited rassam and sambar and curd rice. Haven't found another willing person to visit yet.

Sari Shop - Forgot the name but yes a sari shop.

Kadam and Kadam Jewellers - Holy crap! Kadam and Kadam jewellers?!

Bay Area truly just feels like a cleaner better part of India. The number of people, the shops apart, even the weather is truly Indian, minus the hot summers. The hills could as well be a part of the Sahyadris too.

The only difference... it also has the highest concentration of tech companies in a 10 mile radius. Every company worth its salt has a major office here... from Intel, AMD, Google, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Apple, Symantec, Oracle.... There are tonnes of expressways and wide streets, electricity, internet and water supplies are truly uninterrupted. The perfect version of India. How can one ever feel homesick here?

2006-04-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

What sort of a name is "Suri"??

Must not laugh!! TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes for the uninitiated) name their child "Suri".

According to the BBC
Suri means "Red Rose" in Persian and "Princess" in Hebrew.

Well it also means Knife in Marathi and fat hairy Sardar in Punjabi. It reminds me of a guy in Madison with that name, and many Punjabi sardars with that last name. Oh yes my Punjabi neighbours in Pune were the Suris.

My good wishes to Suri, unforunately she inherited some cookie parents. Hope she comes out of that house unscathed.

2006-04-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

Reaching for the Star...Asterix

Growing up in Pune I used to visit this library next door called Shabdashree (loosely translates to Master of Words in Marathi) Library. It was a private enterprise trying to cater to the needs of the local budding bookworms. Academician parents such as mine, also are constantly trying to inculcate a love for reading into their children, however meagre the resources of a library a short walk away from home. And I loved going there! This library was really small.... housed as many books as you could in a small room with every wall filled with bookshelves and magazines in the center. It had a limited collection... Hardy Boys, the Famous Five,the Secret Seven, Archie, Asterix and Tintin. Ofcourse there were a lot more Marathi books that I could never read at a fast enough pace. I know it's pretty shameful.

I did read the whole Famous Five series. I was a big Enid Blyton fan, although I didn't develop much of a taste for Secret Seven. Just seemed like way too many characters. On the Famous Five, I couldn't make any sense out of most of the things these kids were taking to their picnics at the time... bacon, root beer and many others. The daily "waran bhaat" (rice with lentils) was miles away from these foreign victuals. I tried root beer when I came to the States and boy that's the most horrible tasting beverage in the world. Sure beer isn't plesant tasting but that doesn't mean that you feed your kids liquified chewing gum! The worst invention of western civilization.

Soon after I started reading Asterix I noticed that my father took a strangely excessive interest in my comic books and finally it got the extent of competing with me for the Asterix-i. When I questioned him about it he said something to the effect that it's a comic book written for grown-ups. "They are not written for children at all." Just take a look at the names of the characters:

Asterix - Asterisk - The Star of the Series
Obelix - Obelisk - Shaped like an obelisk and a menhir delivery man too
Cacofonix - Cacofonic - Bard who plays discordant notes
Unhygienix - not hygienic - Fishmonger who sells fishy fish

The list goes on. Roman names also have a deeper meaning to them (Onus Balonus hehehhe). The satire ofcourse is something I would never understand back in the day. The best one from my latest read "Asterix and the Black Gold" was Dubbelosix - from 007 - a spy with contraptions befitting a 1st century Bond. What's more Asterix is translated from the original in French. Anthea Bell and Dereck Hockridge are supergeniuses!

So more recently thanks to my favorite local public library I've gained a way to take a walk into my past, meet Asterix again and this time with an adult brain and vocabulary too. Shabdashree put a limit of one book per day. No such rules at my local bibliotheque... I load myself with as many Asterixes as I can hold, much to the dismay of other kids frequenting the juvenile section. If I haven't sung enough paens to my favourite hang-out already, here's one more...

2006-04-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

BBC News - Have your say

BBC Have your say

Check this out if you care, my comment got published.

Added: Thursday, 13 April, 2006, 06:06 GMT 07:06 UK

Give tax breaks to American companies that manufacture goods in Mexico as opposed to China. A more affluent Mexico is better for America than a more affluent China.

What's more imagine how much money and fuel can be saved just based on costs to ship goods from China to the USA.

If a lot of good jobs are created by American companies in Mexico, likely the influx of illegal immigrants into the US will be reduced and an outflux of some illegals back might increase.

Saket Jamkar, Santa Clara, United States

2006-04-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

Inside Man : Not just other heist movie

AR Rehman is making even greater in-roads into Hollywood. The title song for "Inside Man" is Chaiyya Chaiyya from Dil Se (a huge Bollywood hit), although I don't quite see how it fits into the grand scheme of things. Most other aspects of the movie are very logical.

Heist movies like Ocean's 11 are good fun, though I wouldn't classify them as my favourite genre. I never recall them when I am penning down my favourites lists anywhere. Inside Man, however is an exceptional movie. Although one could arguably get just about the same effect by watching this one on DVD, I was so impressed by the whole movie, that I'd recommend watching it in the theaters just because those guys really deserve that money.

I don't know where to begin with the compliments. The cast is superb... Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Willem Dafoe. I haven't seen such a talented line-up in quite a while and all doing such a fine job.

I read on IMDB that Spike Lee movies (like this one) have a lot of political messages. Helping the cause of Sikhs in the United States is an important one in this movie. A Sikh character in the movie talks about how he gets identified as an Arab wherever he goes. Hopefully a successful movie such as this will help reduce any race-motivated violence against them.

The one problem with the movie is not being able to really describe it without giving out some of the suspense. The basics of the story are that a brilliant bank robber (played by Clive Owen) takes over a bank and holds some people hostage. Denzel Washington plays Detective Frazier, an NY cop, who fights a battle of wits against the bank robber. The story is very hard to predict. I think this is an amazing piece of writing and I'd be watching out for other movies by Russell Gewirtz. As heist movies go, this one is as good as it gets.

2006-03-25T09:40:00.000-08:00

Scott Adams on Losing Weight

I realized today that Dilbert seems to have a paunch. Us engineers have such a tendency to gain weight... we walk about 300 meters in total on any given day. From the parking ramp to the cube in the morning, the cube to the break room for some mocha, the cube to the rest room to get rid of all that mocha and then the trip downstairs to the cafeteria and back around chow time. I found Scott Adams's "Dilbert Blog" today and I read this article on Losing Weight. After about 3-4 years of trying to lose weight and succeeding every year, I know most of these tricks already but would recommend them to anyone else who is trying.

First, buy a scale and use it daily. As soon as you find yourself 3 pounds over your target weight, begin the Scott Adams Diet™.

Ofcourse the assumption here is that you are already close to your ideal weight, so most of this advice may not work for the morbidly obese. For the morbidly obese kids out there, start breathing twice as fast and getting off the couch once a day.

Adjust your schedule to allow exercise every day at a set time. When that time comes, no matter how tired you feel, put on your sneakers and workout clothes. Then exercise as much or as little as you feel you can handle. The idea is to make it a routine. There is no other objective at this point. Once it’s a routine, you’ll automatically start getting better at it. That part takes care of itself.

Here are other Weight Loss mantras that work for me, let's call it the Saket Diet™:
- No Sugar
Completely get off sugar. I try to avoid any sugar during the week and then reward myself once on the weekend. Use Splenda in your coffee. Sweetners with aspartme cause poisoning, so sucralose seems to be a little less dangerous than others.
- Snack Healthy
If you feel hungry between meals, snack healthy. I keep a bag of walnuts at work to feed the creatures growling inside my stomach. Walnuts are probably the best source of omega-3 fatty acids too. If you just have to eat chips, get a tiny bag of Baked Lays or Doritos from the vending machine.
- Fruit for breakfast
No sugar remember, so cereals typically don't work. I like to eat a banana or an orange or some red grapes with plain non-fat yoghurt. Non-fat milk and "I can't believe it's not butter" are your friends, fruit juice cocktails and orange juice aren't.
- Burn Baby Burn
Exercise everyday if you feel like you're way off target. When I follow the above regimen with daily exercise I lose about 2 pounds every week.

ADDENDUM:
In response to Ashutosh's query... My decision-making is a lot easier because I can always choose to eat a salad or a sandwich at work on weekdays. I'd say stick to salad/sandwich for atleast one meal everyday.
I try to incorporate a lot of good foods in my meals:
- Olive Oil: Extremely healthy because it contains a lot of good cholesterol. Mediterranean people are supposed to live longer because of it.
- Salmon: One of the reasons why Japanese people live so long.

Few single foods bring as many valuable contributions to the table in significant quantities as salmon. It is an excellent source of high-quality protein, containing all the essential amino acids. Salmon contains vitamins A, D, B6 and B2, as well as niacin and riboflavin. Calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium and phosphorus are also present in appreciable amounts in this choice seafood. The fats in Salmon are predominantly un-saturated.

- Wheat Bread
- Avocado
- Yoghurt

2006-03-24T18:14:00.000-08:00

Care to read some news about India? Well Hold on Tight

Reading news about India online is not for the faint-hearted. I am totally turned off by most of these sites like Rediff, TOI and others. All of them have these bright fluorescent advertisements, loads of pop-ups and animated GIFs moving around all the place. Surprisingly these are the only places online that make you feel like you're at an Indian bazaar with hawkers yelling "ek kilo das rupaiyya", crying children, dirt and filth all over, beggars begging for alms. Now that's a pretty extra-ordinary achievement... bringing India's filth to the World Wide Web.

I don't understand why these people don't realize that unobstrusive advertizing like Google will bring them so much more traffic. No person who cares about his sanity would choose to read news on such pages. I remain a faithful reader of the BBC news website which has no adveritizing at all. That is admirable and I am thankful that the British Government is providing such an excellent service to the world.

A friend of mine is working on a nice site for news about India. It is called India Goes.

India Goes is pretty good and also has some options that I care about but don't find elsewhere. Take "Blogs" for instance or the "World Tech" section. The interface could be a tad better, I definitely don't like long lists, but my friend told me that they will be updating the interface soon.

2006-03-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

The History Channel: Don't channel-surf anymore!
A friend of mine called Sateesh once said, "Democracy doesn't work, because majority of the people are stupid and so is a decision made by the majority". I think it a similar logic applies to television too. Most of it is lame because it caters to those idiots out there. I am a nightmare for people who have to endure my channel surfing. Rarely does one arrive upon quality TV programming of the caliber of the history channel. I spent the better part of the day watching it and I am amazed by some of the things I learnt.

So what did I watch this weekend? I started out by learning about the recent history of Iran from 1978 on a show called "Declassified". History is just a chain of events leading in a logical fashion to the problems we face today. The seeds of the Iranian nuclear stand-off were sown in the American support for the Shah of Iran. Iran has a very interesting recent history, from the abdication of the Shah, the arrival of Khomeni, to the bloody Iran-Iraq conflict.

Information recently declassified from Stalin's tyrannical rule over Russia was next. Some of it has been alluded to in George Orwell's "Animal Farm". What was very depressing was the number of people Russian, Jews, others who died from Stalin's oppressive policies. The Nazis were pretty bad judging by Holocaust, but what is even worse is the enslavement and murder of millions of "your own people". Hitler was pretty mild compared to Stalin in retrospect. Such was the horror of Stalin's rule over USSR and 10s of millions of people died. Finally when Stalin was on his deathbed, apparently lying in a pool of his own urine, no one called the doctors for a while. When they did, some stupid doctors arrived because all the smart Jewish doctors were in Gulags in Siberia because of Stalin's former orders. How ironic... death the equaliser as they say.

Also learnt a bit about the Kennedy family but I won't bore you with the details. If you don't subscribe to cable TV like my friend Hob,I hope this changes your mind.

2006-03-05T23:14:00.000-08:00

A Full Weekend

After a long time I really enjoyed myself this weekend. The most fun discovery I made this week was this Yahoo chatroom called Trivia Madness 5. It is a chatroom devoted to trivia and the regular members of this room have brought Trivia down to an exact science. 24 hours a day there is someone asking questions here. One regular question followed by a tune you identify. Unlike the BCQC and much like Jeopardy, speed is rewarded and the fastest person to reply wins a point for the Freds or the Wilmas or the Guys vs the Gals.(Yes it's "a battle of the sexes" in there and there are many noteworthy lady geeks who outdo the men all the time.) I did okay for a first timer and I even signed up to read questions sometime. The Classic Rock songs just make the whole experience memorable. I downloaded "Eye of the Tiger" from the movie Rocky, quenched my thirst with Oasis, and enjoyed some Cranberries.

I also played Age of Empires 3 on PC. My friend Priyadarshan used to download and burn CDs of the older incarnations of AOE for me long back, (thanks Priyu) so AOE 3 wasnt something I was totally alien to. I am hoping to finish the demo next weekend. Unfortunately it doesn't save game progress, so I am going to have to play from scratch again. The game's good. My graphics card doesn't meet the minimum spec recommended (guess who works at a company that makes graphics cards? ;)), so I had to lower the settings a tad. But once I did that the scenes looked pretty good with the minor inconsistencies such as men walking through passing carts.

Also chanced upon Asterix after a very long time at the library. My friends at the Boat Club QC had told me about the character called "Dubbelo-six" from Asterix and the Black Gold, meant to ridicule James Bond. He does look like Sean Connery, Ramu. I had read all the Asterixii and Tintins as a kid but wasn't smart enough to understand the satire there, so I hope to revisit Asterix again.

On the gluttony front, I got Masala Fried Fish from Spice Hut in Sunnyvale. It was the bestest pomfret, just the right amount of spice and didn't seem greasy to touch either. Went to Kebab and Curry off El Camino Real, great food but pathetic service. Also had avial for another meal, something I loved but hadn't tried before.

2006-02-26T00:02:00.000-08:00

Good Night, and Good Luck : A Review
"There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful. Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, 'When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.' The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival."
- Edward R Murrow

In his two most recent movies, George Clooney has ensured that cinema no longer remains a sword rusting in the scabbard during a battle. After watching both "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck", I've gained a tremendous respect for George Clooney. Clooney wrote the screenplay, directed and also acted in "Good Night, and Good Luck", one of the nominees for the year's best motion pictures at the Oscars.

Next the basics of the plot... "Good Night, and Good Luck" tackles the subject of Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist witchhunts and how a brave CBS television host Edward R Murrow takes on Senator McCarthy. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I'm apalled at the state's choice of a Senator in 1954. Russ Feingold, the current senator from Wisconsin and a UW-Madison grad, is making up for it in good measure nevertheless.

Could Clooney's father, himself a news-anchor, have influenced the choice of subject? I'd like to think so. The parallels to today's political scenario are very hard to miss. I am alluding to the Bush administration's wire-tapping program against suspected Al-Qaeda contacts and how the administration requires no warrants to snoop in on the phone-calls of any resident of America. This connection appears to be a result of happenstance rather than design. No matter how perspicacious Clooney is, he couldn't have divined the existence of a wire-tapping program a year before the matter was brought into the media spotlight.

One of the most brilliant cinematic techniques in the movie was to employ McCarthy to play the role of Senator McCarthy. Quoting IMDB

"Clooney had said that when the movie had undergone test screenings, audience members felt that the McCarthy character was overacting a bit, not realizing that it was the actual McCarthy through archive footage." :)

The decision to make the picture black & white may have been forced as a result of the use of archival McCarthy video. I am not always in agreement with the Academy's choices for the best movies of the year but this one does deserve each one of the 6 nominations. Clooney a la Superman... "Sexiest Man Alive" and a nominee for best director and best screenplay writer of the year and best actor in a supporting role for "Syriana". Membership to a very select club of movie-stars with a worthy message. Hats off!

2006-02-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

Conan's Valentine!

It is a grim world that we live in these days. Violence from the cartoons, climate change, avian flu spreading... you get the picture. I don't particularly enjoy reading the news anymore. I love news that tickles me and yet surprises me. Claude Shannon was so right about the information content of a message. I = log2(1/P) was it ? (Information content of a message is inversely proportional to the probability of it's occurence, for the uninitiated.)

The best such piece of news I read today is about Conan O'Brien, my favourite late night TV host and Finland's president Tarja Halonen meeting up for Valentine's day. Conan found out one day that his viewership in Finland shot up meteorically because he looks like the presidential candidate Tarja Halonen. The resemblance is uncanny and Bollywood-esque too, like a pair of twins separated at the "Kumbh Mela". I couldn't stop laughing the first time I saw a picture of the two together. They do say that there are two people with the exact same face somewhere in the world. I wonder where the other person with my face lives, although for that person's sake I hope she isn't a girl. :)

These days I frequent the Reuters website to read a section that is called "Oddly Enough". It is an assortment of the most bizarre news stories of the day. Yesterday ofcourse it co-incided with the headlines too. I am alluding to the story of Dick Cheney shooting some guy in Texas during a hunting excursion. There's my good deed for the day, helping you while away those precious minutes at work and yet improving your productivity.

2006-02-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

India : A History Book Review

The Maharashtra State Board did a shabby job of teaching me history. It was probably because the curriculum changed when I was in class 8 and we missed out on learning about medieval India. I did pick up "The Discovery of India" by Nehru at one point but I was a little demotivated by his meanderings about the Harappan civilization. It seemed like a layperson's account of Indian history with semi-autobiographical notes rather than a historian's approach to the subject. Nehru talks about travelling to Harappa or meeting RC Banerjee and makes some remarks about Harappa which just sound like opinion rather than fact. I am not the best judge of the quality of the book overall and my father does praise it a lot. Latter parts of the book are likely much better.

I also tried reading a book by Dr. Bhandarkar of the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute and I was immensely pleased by the scientific approach that his book took to the history of Maharashtra. Bhandarkar's book talks about the difficulties of placing events in Indian history and then tells us how the Chinese maintain an impeccable chronological record. So the dates assigned to many events in Maharashtra's ancient history are based on the timing of Huan Tsang and other Chinese travellers' journeys to India. Having read these two books around the same time, I just didn't find "The Discovery of India" compelling enough.

This weekend I decided to learn more about Indian history and scanned just about all the books in that particular section of the Santa Clara City Library. I found a book with photographs from the "Raj" and loved it. It had these pictures of a time long gone, from Maharajas and princes to snake charmers. One of my favourites was a picture of students at Grant Medical College standing in a circle observing a professor dissecting a cadaver.

I also found "India : A History" by John Keay and I have been reading it incessantly ever since. Nehru couldn't have known some of these facts when he wrote his book while he was imprisoned in the Ahmednagar prison. John Keay's opinions seem not unlike those of most educated Indians. I daresay even an Indian couldn't have done a better job. So far I have read the chapters about Harappa, the Vedic Age and Invasions by the Turks and Mongols.

Having grown up in Pune, one always hears descriptions of Shivaji and the Marathas in such superlative terms that the significance of the Maratha achievement fails to make an impact. The fact that Pune was the capital of the Maratha empire that controlled 70% of the landmass on the Indian subcontinent is an incredible achievement. What makes it more noteworthy is the fact that for many 100s of years India was ruled by Islamic invaders who weren't indigenous people. For instance Babur was born in Samarkand in Central Asia. Muhammed of Ghori who defeated Prithviraj Chauhan after having lost to him more than 10 times also ruled the throne of Delhi but was a native of present-day Afghanistan.

ADDENDUM: Actually I take that back. Whether Babur or Muhammed of Ghori were really Indian is a question that can't be answered. Pune is farther away from Delhi when compared to Samarkand and Afghanistan. The only distinguishing feature between the Turks & Mughals when compared to natives in what is today Northern India is religion. Genetically Punjabis are probably closer to Afghanis than South Indians. If you don't understand me never mind. Point I am trying to make here is that nationality or kinship is hard to define. Today the Mughals seem foreign because that's how borders are defined today, but for the 1300s they didn't venture too far from their homelands.

2006-02-04T01:11:00.000-08:00

A White Woman's Perspective on Indian Men
The Courage To Love talks about Dina's experiences with a Pakistani man whom she was involved with for 4 years. It gives us the American girl's perspective into relationships between American women and South Asian men. I know relationships can be pretty hard and especially inter-racial, inter-cultural ones where you have no control over your background.

2006-02-02T12:05:00.000-08:00

My New Blog

I forgot about this until Navrina visited this new blog today. If you'd like to read poems that I've written in the past please visit
A Time to Rhyme

I am trying to write another poem this week. If I do manage to wordsmith it correctly, I'll post it on both blogs. It is an idea that occurred to me during my move last week. I used to stay at the Hamptons at Cupertino before but now I've actually moved to Santa Clara, a little north of Nvidia. But with the move last weekend I got no time to write the poem.

I'm also going to try to read about iambic pentameter and figures of speech and hopefully improve the quality of my next poem.

2006-01-29T02:36:00.000-08:00

Official Website

To all ye COEPians, Ive made a lot of changes to the COEP entry on Wikipedia. Please feel free to visit and make any changes or additions. Since we have no control over the atrocious official website, this is the best we can do.