Yantrakaal

All hail Vishwanathan Anand -- the undisputed chess champion of world. On a day when the whole of India celebrates and shares in Anand's spectacular win at Bonn, news comes of a czechmate of another kind and this is in a sense that is hilarious if not downright poignant. The rule of law in India as articulated by the police and the judiciary is shown up to be the sham that we in India know so well. When terrorists are exploding bombs all across the country and Raj Thackeray's thugs are beating up Biharis in Bombay who does our police jump on ? a Czech entomologist, Emil Kucera who is collecting insects in Darjeeling ! Ok, perhaps he was Chinese spy or a Pakistani terrorist in disguise but since no has even hinted anything like that it, is unlikely to be so. What is more likely is that fell foul of the law and local sarkari babu felt that this was too good an opportunity, to make money, to let go so easily. Had Emil been wise to the ways of the India he would have cooll...

Politics in Tamil Nadu has taken an unparalleled and unprincipled turn towards hypocrisy with the naked espousal of terrorism. For years India has been crying hoarse about Pakistan and its overt and covert support for the insurgents in Kashmir -- first of the indigenous JKLF variety and then the imported Jihadis of the Taliban, and just when the world has started to listen to us ... the Dravidian parties want us to do what we have been criticising Pakistan about !! The LTTE represents the most venal and vicious brand of terrorism that has menaced the planet -- they were the first to deploy a human bomb and have devalued the concept of motherhood by having their lady cadres conceive a child so that they can take advantage of their pregnancy to elude security checks while carrying bombs strapped to their bodies !!! Whether such depraved terrorists have a genuine cause to fight for or not is none of our concern. There is a democratically elected government in Sri Lanka and they are ...

Now that a motley menagerie of politicians that includes the apparent "leader" Mamata Banerjee, shadowy Maoists, the thuggish cadres of the ruling party and an utterly incompetent yet hugely arrogant political leadership have managed to drive the little Nano out of Bengal ... it may be useful to think back on events that have happened in and around the dying city of Calcutta. Folk wisdom says that it is the militant trade-unionism of the CPM that has led to the de-industrialisation of Bengal. Those of us who are old enough to remember the tumultous -- or anarchic -- 70s and 80s might remember slogans like "Tata Birla'r kalo haath, bhenge dao, gunriye dao" -- break and destroy the evil hand of the Tatas and the Birlas. And then there was the mindless opposition to computers : "Automation, rokto diye rukhtey hobey" -- Automation has to be stopped with bloodshed ! However, a close look at recent events would tell a different tale. Nirad Chaudhury had a...

In an earlier blog post I have written about Zoho Creator , the truly amazing platform for developing applications and deploying them on the web using the metaphor of Cloud Computing. I have introduced this platform in my Systems Engineering course both at the Praxis Business School as well as at the School of Management at IIT Kharagpur and the product has been very well received by students at both places. Management students who had in the past felt that programming was beneath their dignity ( though in reality it was more often beyond their ability :) have now started writing real programs. As a part of the course, the students have to develop a basic order collection application that has a few slightly complex concepts like referential integrity and updating multiple tables and to help them I have created a presentation that shows the various steps that are involved. Being an open source enthusiast I had created the presentation in Open Office but then I found to my dismay that ma...

The news that the Supreme Court is planning to introduce a fast track court for corporates who can afford steep judicial fees -- and in the process earn windfall income -- raises some very disturbing questions. Profiteering from the sale -- at high prices -- of scarce goods and services is referred to as ' blackmarketing ' and in India both the administration as well as civil society views it as crime. Jawaharlal Nehru had in fact wanted blackmarketeers to be hanged from lampposts and even today the government threatens to crack down on hoarders and blackmarketeers every now and then. Unfortunately, if not paradoxically, the Indian state is no stranger to this tendency towards blackmarketing when it comes to the delivery of its own goods and services. " Tatkal " schemes -- in telephones, rail tickets and gas connections -- are nothing but blackmarketing in disguise where those who are willing to pay a premium are delivered scarce goods and services ahead of t...

During the Second World War, the Allies had D-Day ! We in India were never so fortunate but the closest we could have come to that event was when we won the the World Cup at Lords -- exactly 25 years ago. India as a nation had been around for a long time, but India as a state had arrived ! It was our beachhead in the Global Arena ... yes there will be miles to go, but nevertheless this was where we planted our flag and showed -- not so much to the world, but to ourselves -- that, yes, we could do it. No one had yet thought of offshoring, outsourcing or that the world was flat ! Mittals acquisition of Arcellor or Tata's acquisition of Corus and JLR was inconceivable .. but even though we did not any of this -- nor did most of us suspect that it would turn out this way -- yet it was a defining moment : Yes we could, we would, and we DID it !! Where was I on that day ? At Goa, in the restaurant of Hotel Zuari having a single plate of biryani for the entire duration of the match ! Why ...

My students at the Praxis Business School are forever curious to know why I am such an ardent user of open source products -- particularly Open Office. If the whole world is using -- or is perceived to use -- MS Office, why is it that I have this aversion to MS Word, MS PowerPoint and MS Excel ? Of greater interest is their concern that by using -- and advocating -- Open Source, are they jeopardising their own career prospects in the software industry ? Will companies that thrive on selling software blacklist them -- at campus interviews -- if they are perceived to be too enamoured about Open Source. My response is as follows ... ................................................................................................................................... # We need to have a clear understanding of what is meant by Open Source .. 1. Open source is not necessarily free software. Actually the Hindi nomenclature is more explicit in this regard. Open Mukt, whereas Free Muft ! 2. Wh...