Yantrakaal

One of the most overused words in digital cyberia is paradigm but unfortunately there are instances when there is really no synonym that will suffice. Such is the case here where I describe a completely new way of doing business in the book publishing industry. After Encyclopedia Britannica, Travel Agents and other brick-and-mortar establishments that have been severely challenged by web based business models, it may be the turn of book publishers next ! The online publishing and print-on-demand (OLPPOD) business is all set give the established publishers a run for their money and offer new hope and unprecedented empowerment to unknown authors. Online publishing is old hat. I have been writing on the web since 1998 but have always felt that substantial pieces of work need to be in hard copy for the reader to first enjoy and second make sense of complex content. However efforts to get one's work in print has been very difficult. While JK Rowlings and other well known authors have no...

Why do companies exist ? Since companies consist of individuals who have the skills for which the market is willing to pay .. why is it that companies do not disintegrate ( or rather deconstruct ? ) into its constituent components ? Ronald Coase was the first to ask this question in 1937 in his essay on “The Nature of the Firm” and his answer was simple : The cost of doing a certain transaction – that adds value – is less inside company than it is outside. What he meant was that doing business by assembling all the right people and support services inside an establishment was more efficient than trying to find and coordinate the same things in the world at large. This answer was good enough for him to win the Nobel Prize because people saw for themselves how individual craftsmen in the cottage industry could not compete in cost and lost out to the mega corporation. But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for many of us, this was not the last word on the subject. Jacques Derrida coine...

[ a more refined version of my earlier post on the same topic ] Movies created without a camera or human actors is nothing new. From animated cartoons by Walt Disney to dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park tools to create artificial characters have played an important role in movie production and of late productions like 300 have demonstrated the versatility of digital technology to transcend the limitations of physical reality. All this however pales into insignificance when we consider the immense potential of virtual worlds technology – as implemented in environments like Second Life and Active Worlds. Movie making as we know it today is set to change beyond recognition as producers and cinematographers realize the disruptive impact that this is going to have in the future. Virtual worlds have their origin in interactive computer games of the category that are commonly referred to as Massively MultiUser Online Role Playing Games. Technology that first appeared in games ...

St. Xaviers Collegiate School, Calcutta has organised a Computer Exhibition to help students look beyond the boring ( truly boring ) world of the Computer Syllabus that they have to follow. While most students stuck would still tend to stick to the straight and narrow, I helped my son and two of his class-mates create a movie based on and shot in location inside Second Life. If your bandwidth supports it, please watch ... but be aware that these are heavy files with embedded music & voice-over Part 1 Part 2 and here are two images ...........................................................................

I have been trying to access the article on Nandigram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandigram but have not been able to go past the wikipedia home page and into ANY of the articles. I am from Calcutta and this has been going for the past two days .. My brother-in-law however is able to access the same pages from Ahmedabad .. which I thought was funny. What is even more funny is that even in Calcutta, if I dial into my office LAN and then access the internet through the company firewall ( which happens to be outside Calcutta ) then I have no problems in accessing the same pages. I do know that wikipedia is banned ( or rather blocked ) in China .. by the Great Firewall of China. Is something similar happening here as well.

As virtual worlds, as epitomised by SecondLife and perhaps ActiveWorlds , comes closer and closer to real worlds, where is it that we will have first contact ? where is it that the borderline between these two worlds will get blurred if not dissolved first ? The obvious answer in the domain of entertainment. But how ? Today's Business Standard carries an article that explains how game developers are planning to work with the Mumbai film industry ( painfully referred to as Bollywood !) to develop interactive games based on actual movies ... and possibly using the the names and images of well known film stars. This is good but this has been done before with Angelina Jolie and some of her movies but the real challenge is to take it to the next level ... Why not shoot real movies, that is movies that will be shown in real life, using settings and actors in virtual worlds ? The movie 300 has been in the news recently because of the extensive use of digital technology for creating t...

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey , where on the banks of the Hooghly River, near the town of Murshidabad, Robert Clive and his Indian allies, defeated the Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal and laid the foundation of British Rule. There will be events to commemorate this Battle and the overwhelming tone and tenor of these events will be that of regretful nostalgia .. to commiserate with the subjugation of India and its loss of independence to a foreign military power. But is this really correct ? Should we not celebrate this event as the dawn of the Indian Renaissance ? Politically correct historians and semi-literate bards and dramatists have given this event an emotional tone that is quite out of sync with the real emotions that were felt by the common people who lived in those tumultuous times. I believe that the population was actually quite jubilant at the fall of the tyrannical Nawab -- and the utter lawlessness that his rule symbolised -- and a direct ec...