Yantrakaal

I achieved a major life-goal today when I managed to acquire a new machine which is completely free of Microsoft products ... Thanks to Financial Express and the Big Idea contest , I am now the proud owner of an HCL Ultraportable Notebook MiLeap .. and it was delivered today ... loaded with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution and the ease with which it became operational is amazing. I simply pushed the power button and the machine blinked to life. It offered me a choice of Ubuntu and DOS to boot up .. and when I pressed the Ubuntu option it asked me just three questions : my name (and password), my city / country and language. That was it ! Machine was up and operational !! I connected my Airtel broadband cable into the lan port and the machine sensed the network and hooked on. I fired up the Firefox browser and breezed into my portal. No problems .. not even with the bangla unicode font. I had to only download the Shockwave plugin to see some of my fancy stuff. Next stop OpenOffice .. whi...

Today's copy of the Economic Times carries two articles that, taken together, highlight the disastrous corner that India has painted itself into in the area of education, and then offers some hope of finding a path through which it could extricate itself ! If this is too confusing, consider the following : First, Rajrishi Singhal [ End License Raj in Education ] has very elegantly made the point, known to most of us in academia that it is the license-control mindset India's bureaucracy -- led by the last two, regressive and venal, education ministers -- that is at the heart of the darkness that has eclipsed the academic landscape. Jurassic institutions like the AICTE -- that insist that educational institutions cannot have a profit motive but must pretend, hypocritically, that they are charitable organisations -- have ensured that educational services cannot be delivered to the citizens unless it is through entities that are controlled by politicians. This includes both the Pub...

PanIIT in association with Infosys has embarked on a well meaning programme to get professors from the US come and teach professors in India how to teach effectively. Unfortunately they are missing the wood for the trees, or even if they did find a tree, it would be the wrong one that they would be barking up against ! Because you do not need people from the US to come and teach us how to teach ! There are enough people in India who can teach, and teach well, but the problem lies in getting them to teach. But why do good people not take to teaching in India ? The answer has been given out ad nauseum but since PanIIT has still not understood it, let me explain once again. A full professor at IIT, with 10 years of teaching experience, gets Rs 40,000 per month before taxes are deducted. Whereas a student passing out of the B.Tech program in almost any engineering college gets about Rs 20,000+ from day 1. So unless a person (a)has a separate and independent income that makes the IIT salary...

Star Ananda -- the popular Bengali TV channel from Calcutta -- has started an interesting bengali community at their website but the tool that they offer to write in Bengali is rather diffucult to use. I have modified the excellent tool that Deepayan has created on his website and have made it available as a widget that you can embed in your blog. Since Deepayan's tool is available on available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, i believe that i am free to use, modify and redistribute it with the provision that it is under the GPL again. If you want to embed it in your website use this code : This tool has been used to create the Sonartoree blog as well as to post in the Star Ananda website. It should work well with as long as your machine is unicode compliant. P.S. For a good collection of free, Unicode compliant, printer friendly Bengali fonts I would like to thank the good folks at Omicronlab .

I have always been fascinated by the possibility of high volume education delivery and the immense potential this has to transform the country ... without taking recourse to divisive tactics like reservation. My first attempt to articulate this was in 1999 when I participated in the CSIR sponsored New Millenium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative and proposed the idea of Shikshaajaal . The proposal, like most proposals sent to the government went -- i suppose -- straight into some bureaucratic dustbin. My second attempt was in the CII Eastern Region Meeting on Talent Management in 2007 where I delivered the keynote address and presented the idea once again ... but all to no avail. The distinguished delegates, had their lunch, dozed through the lecture and went back to their mundane existence. My third attempt was directed at Big Idea Contest that asked participants to send in ONE Big Idea that can change the face of the country and to articulate this in less than 50...

Mediocrity has finally triumphed over Merit. The Supreme Court of India -- led by the Chief Justice who has been a direct beneficiary of the politics of reservation -- has sided with our politicians and have declared that in India, the search for Excellence is over. From now on we should be in search of Irrelevance. The IITs and IIMs , that last, albeit shaky bastion, of the intellectual elite has fallen to the powers of the Dark Lord of Venal Populism ... from the depths of despair the citizen cries out What Next ? For all such anguished souls ... all that we can say is Take Heart. This is not the first and shall certainly not be the last ... Let us go back in time and reexamine the painful journey that the people of this hapless land have had to travel .. and how they have fared. Those of you who have been born and brought up in Calcutta in the late sixties and early seventies may recollect an organisation called Haringhata Diary, owned and mismanaged by the Government of West Ben...

The Internet -- as the TCP/IP backbone network -- has been around for a long time but the World Wide Web ( or simply the "Web" as we know it) really took off with Netscape. With its genesis in Mosaic / SpyGlass ... Netscape was the first icon of the fledgling Web and the Netscape IPO is very often taken as the first milepost in the long journey. That was the First Era, the era of Netscape. But Netscape was shouldered aside by the marketing might of Microsoft but strangely enough was not quite replaced by it. Despite trying so hard and with its flagship IE becoming the default browser by sheer brute force, it was not Microsoft but Yahoo that symbolised the Second Era. With Tripod, Geocities and other web properties under its belt, Yahoo was the big boy and the definitive icon. But like hot adolescents that grow into pot bellied middleage, Yahoo too had to give way to next emerging hotshot .. that is Google. The Third Era of the Web was symbolised by Google .. the icon of innov...