Yantrakaal

The disastrous performance of the Indian Cricket team in the World Cup will no doubt spawn an outpouring of unimplementable solutions like "change the coach / captain", "get fresh players" etc .. however all these and other respectable solutions are useless because the people who are entrusted to implement any of these are all (a) corrupt and (b) incompetent and there is no hope of anyone who is not corrupt or not incompetent to find a place in the cricket administration . Hence I would like to propose a solution that is absolutely person independent .. Let us create a catalog of all possible first class cricketers in India. Let us define a metric against which the performance of any cricketer can be measured. This could be in terms of runs scored, balls faced, number of 4s/6s, wickets taken, runs given away and so on. This metric should be moderated by certain weighting factors, like 'strength' of the opposition ( obviously, 50 runs scored against South Afr...

Sometimes it feels good to beat your own chest ... and say ... that I said so. And that is precisely what I intend to do in this post. Way back in 2005 i had written in a post that games of the future would be controlled by thought processes and had said that perhaps it will take 10 years for this technology to mature. And here we are today with Emotiv Systems announcing that this is a reality today and would be commercialised by 2008. My second prediction was that if you want to make money in Second Life it has to be initiated through the entertainment route. Not financial institutions or banks. Today we have Sony announcing their presence with a world similar to Second Life where you can not only build and create your own stuff, you can actually play the Playstation type games. I have two other predictions that are coming close to realisation. First the 3D graphic displays and Open clients that will allow anyone to connect to ANY of the virtual worlds using the SAME client softwar...

Good Morning friends : It is my pleasure to deliver this key note address and I thank the CII-Eastern Region and its Chairman, Mr Bhusen Raina for the privilege of addressing this august body. We are assembled here today to talk about how we can enable excellence and I believe that to excel it is necessary to have the talent to excel. So my focus today will be on the management of Talent in India. We are told that India is moving away from an agrarian economy to an economy dominated, not by industry as it has happened in the west, but directly to a knowledge economy .. an economy dominated by services. As a management consultant, buzz words like these should be a part of my professional repertoire but strangely enough I am always hesitant to be so discrete with my thoughts. The world is not quite so black-and-white ... it is always shades of grey. So when I talk about an industrial approach to talent management I will try to weave into my words, some thoughts and ideas drawn fro...

Advaita Vedanta is the school of thought that lies at the heart of the perennial philosophy – the Sanatan Dharma – of India and it has been elegantly articulated by seers like Sankara and Vivekananda. Second Life is a popular software application that has evolved in the 21 st century out of the seemingly trivial genre of computer games that are collectively referred to as Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games. Is there a connection between the sublime and the apparently ridiculous ? Perhaps there is … That is what we explore here. Advaita Vedanta is a profound discipline that has been researched and commented upon by numerous learned persons and it would be futile to try and explain it in a few paragraphs here. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this article, it is necessary to look at some of the important concepts around which it is based. An important idea that Advaitins believe very strongly in is the concept of : Brahma Satya, Jagat Mithya – the World is an Illu...

or "Why you cannot create a camera in-world in Second Life" It all began with a simple desire, to know who was visiting my Mahamaya Temple in SecondLife and the first step was very simple. I created a phantom, nearly-invisible, trip-wire around my teleport point and sent out an email to my blog whenever someone passed through it and this helped me track who all were visiting the Temple. But then I got ambitious and decided to see if I could create an in-world camera that would take a snap of the individual instead of just sending the email. I thought that it would be easy but it is not. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it seemed to be until I realised that it is IMPOSSIBLE .. and here is why. Objects in SL are represented as pieces of data and it is the SecondLife client software that assembles this data and gives it a visual representation. So if I had to create an in-world camera, then I would have to use LSL to create an full fledged SecondLife client itse...

I am often asked a question on whether it is possible for SecondLife to be a source of revenue and my answers is simple : depends on what you do there. Like the Web, SL is a platform and a platform does not make money. There are websites that are a source of revenue and there are websites that are purely informational or educative and SL is no different. I believe that one of the biggest sources of revenue in SL could be online games. Games are a worldwide industry that draws billions of dollars of revenue and the popularity of this industry lies in the fact that Microsoft, with XBOX, Sony with PS3 and Nintendo have developed specialist hardware devices for people to access these games. If you look closely, the fundamental architecture of the games that run on these platforms is very similar to the 3D Virtual Universe technology that is the backbone of SecondLife. It is all a matter of positioning and moving 'solid' artifacts through a virtual space and making them interact wi...

After all the murder and mayhem around SEZ and the obnoxious quota regime, there is a ray of hope that things can improve for the better in India. First of course the news Infosys and its 50% growth in quarterly profits. More than Infosys, it is a great sign that things are going well for outsourcing industry in general and the IT industry in particular. But IT adds only 5% to the GDP and touches perhaps 3% people in the country. For the other 97% there is a bigger ray of hope as well thanks to two initiatives taken by the Supreme Court. First : They have tried to free the police from the tyranny of the local party bosses. Policemen are corrupt but not all ... there are some honest law enforcers still left but the moment they do anything good, they are transferred out of the jurisdiction by party bosses whose toes have been tread on. With the formation of the police board in each state, this should be minimised to a large extent. The Home Minister and his cronies will not be able to ...