Yantrakaal

As India breaks free from the indignity of underdevelopment and shoots for the commanding heights of the global economy, the single most important engine that it needs is a competent workforce -- or to be more specific the quality of education that they have access to. Education is of course the responsibility of the government but like most other government responsibilities, it is never taken with the right degree of seriousness. So private participation in this sector is becoming increasingly important and we see a large number of institutions -- from engineering and medical colleges down to secondary and primary English medium schools -- that have emerged. This is fine in principle but very often the management committees of these institutions, much like traders of scarce commodities, charge high prices, compromise on quality and behave with a degree of arrogance that is extremely distressing for the end consumer. The obvious solution is to invite government regulation but that w...

Convocation Address delivered on Sunday, April 3rd 2005 at the College of Engineering & Management at Kolaghat to graduates who have passed out in 2003 / 2004 Friends … I am sure that you all realize that this is perhaps one of the most important days in your life. You and your parents have worked very hard and have made numerous sacrifices of in terms of time, money and the cost of lost opportunities – to reach this point where you will receive a diploma. By the Grace of the Divine Mother and through your own diligent efforts you are now an Engineer.. with a capital ‘E’. Congratulations. It is a day of great joy and rejoicing and I join your parents, your teachers and other guests in congratulating you on passing the second important milestone in your career. You may be wondering what the first milestone was .. it was your admission to this institute and I am sure that you recollect how happy you and your parents felt when that happened. I am also sure thatthere will be many mor...

New ArtWork "installed" at Krishnokoli in celebration of Holi 

I saw an advertisement of the Nokia 9300 and it floored me with its combination of a full functional keyboard … it is truly a combination of a cellphone as well as a full functional computer and that too a free of Microsoft technology .. who could ask for anything more ? Actually I do ask for something more … I want the phone to be smaller and I want the screen and the keyboard to be bigger … but that is an inherent contradiction. The only way that we could overcome this is to have a real laptop ( big screen & keyboard & all ) that is connected to a tiny phone through a USB cable .. but that too is rather clumsy. So here is my solution … Let us design a small PC-card style device that can accommodate the SIM card of the GSM phone. When I am in pure cellphone mode, for example, when I am traveling, the SIM card stays within the cellphone … and I use the cellphone. When I want to browse the internet, I pull out the SIM card from the phone and put in the PC-card style devi...

Though this is perhaps not the most important piece of news on the planet or even on the web, the fact is that we have just returned from our "place in the country" at Prantik. I hate to refer to it as Shantiniketan ... because that is what the Calcutta chatterati is always talking about .. being so very Rabindrik and artistic. For me, Prantik and Bolpur ( and of course SNK) is more interesting because of its proximity to the Shakti piths of Birbhum : Kankali, Sainthia, Fullora (Labhpur), Nalhati and Bakreshwar. Then of course there are the famous kali temples of Tarapith made famous by Bama-dev and Akalipur/Bhadrapur, the ancestral home of Nandakumar. Anyway, to each his own. We had a grand time at Prantik and the neighbourhood. We visited Kankali and Bakreshwar where we had a dip in the hot springs. I have a particularly strong fascination for Bakreshwar because of it very strong Shaiva links. The Akhshaya BaatBriksha ... a truly gigantic banyan tree that covers a a large p...

The "antardhan rahashya" or the mysterious disappearance of this charismatic and controversial political activist of pre-Independence India is a source of endless speculation. Let me add my twist to the tale ... The "official" view is that he died in air-crash in Taiwan while flying from Saigon to "who knows where". In the dying days of the Second World War when the world was in turmoil there is not enough forensic evidence to come to this unambigous conclusion. The conspiracy theorists believe that Subhas Bose fled to Russia and was held captive by Stalin at the instance of the British Government who did not want him back in India. This continued after India's independence because J N Nehru, the man who become the "king" of India after Independence did not want his erstwhile political rival to return as a pretender to the throne. He used his personal proximity with the Soviet leadership to keep Subhas Bose imprisoned in Russia and in ret...

The "left" honourable Finance Minister has been advised by the bureaucrat-babu's of his department to levy a fringe benefit tax on corporates .. and he has duly imposed it on us ... for he is an honourable man. But let us analyse the genesis of the tax, particularly when he considers foreign travel as fringe. No doubt our babu's view "phoren" travel as a fringe benefit. Never have these babu's ever travelled abroad for any worthwhile purpose. Tax payer money has always been used by these babus to visit "phoren" countries ... but never has any such travel resulted in a dollar of exports or a dollar of investment. It is always to see how other countries work, to learn how things are over there and so forth .... By extrapolating their own honest experiences, our babus have come to the conclusion that "phoren" travel is just another name for a "holiday" paid for by the employer ... in this case the hapless Indian tax payer. On t...