Yantrakaal

Pratap Bhanu Mehta's article in the Indian Express on the devil being in the detail of educational reforms is very interesting. It makes us look around for successful models and one that strikes the eye is obviously the Stock Exchange mechanism -- that is perhaps one of the most successful model that has emerged from Indian reform process. To see if this model can be used as a reference, let us see some of the regulatory issues that a "company" needs to address before it can transact business and earn money. At its minimum, a company must adhere to the conditions of the Companies Act and register itself with the Registrar of Companies. We note that the RoC does not really approve or reject the application on the basis of the quality of the companies products or that of its promoters. All that the RoC ensures is that the company meets certain basic disclosure norms in terms of ownership and financial issues. The focus is on accurate disclosure -- or transparency -...

The IIT system, that was born in the early, optimistic years of the young Indian state, was truly one of kind. It articulated the scientific and technological aspirations of a nation, that had just found its feet in the global community , and exemplified -- what Thomas Friedman would later refer to as -- the process of "drilling for talent" : the search for the best and finest minds in the country -- irrespective of where they came from and who they were related to. By raising the bar on exclusivity and fairness, the JEE , that guarded the portals of the IIT system from the general mediocrity of the population, has become such a legend in itself that Brand JEE dominates Brand IIT by miles ! This is evident in the difference in the market esteem ( if not market value ) between IIT students who have cracked the JEE ( undergraduates) and those who have not ( for example the M.Techs, PhDs and what not ). But like all other institutions in the country, the JEE is under at...

Text books define history in terms of events and individuals. Hari Sheldon -- the epicentre of thought in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series -- posits an alternate perspective where the ebb and tide of the human saga is independent of both events and individuals and follows what others call the flow of destiny -- the inevitable. But what sets Asimov's interpretation stand apart from those of others is that he packages destiny in the garb of statistical inevitability. What does this mean ? It means that even if specific individual were not present, or specific events did not happen, the tide of history will -- by and large -- be the same. If Hitler was not born then the circumstances in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century would still have resulted in something like the Second World War. If Isaac Newton was not around and the apple did not fall on his head, it is very unlikely that we would still not have known about gravitation. Some one else would have figured t...

Mamata Banerjee should send a big bouquet of red roses to Komrade Karat because it is to him and his arrogant intransigence that she owes the 19+ Lok Sabha seats that she has won yesterday. The Communist Party of Bengal ( and Kerala and Tripura, if you please ) came to power in 1977 and has since been stuck leach-like to this state. While its intial entry was on the basis of certain ideologies, its uninterrupted continuance has been because of (a) its proprietary process of scientific rigging, that I explained in an earlier post and (b) its skillful division of the anti-left vote between the Congress and its offshoot, the Trinamool Congress. This second policy was perpetuated first by supporting the Congress at the centre and second by planting watermelons" in the Congress party in the state -- watermelons being fruits that are are green, the Congress colour, on the outside and RED at heart ! Trapped between the distant machinations in Delhi and the activities of saboteurs in Cal...

In an earlier post on I had tried to explain why in the study of astrology it makes more sense to observe, track and validate correlations between events in the celestial sphere and that in personal life. An analysis of correlations is a standard tool or technique in statistics and so it makes sense to apply this technique in astrology as well. However, there are certain challenges in this approach because the format in which astrological charts are created or stored is not amenable to the kind of statistical analyses that we are familar with. To overcome this limitation and I have come out with a new way to store and retrieve horoscope charts using sparse matrices and relational database management systems. You can read about this mathematical technique in my paper Statistical Testing of Hypotheses in Astrology . An unexpected byproduct of this effort was my introduction to the Scribd service that allows you to convert any form of document OpenOffice, MS-Office, PDF and what not int...

In general I do not follow the antics on the cricket field but since the IPL is good tamasha and KKR is ostensibly based out of Calcutta ( or god forbid, Kolkata !) I have been wondering why they are putting on such a uniformly bad show. The chatterati have come out with two streams of thought to which let me add my own ... First, SRK after his nationwide success with Chak De India, has come to believe that it is the coach that makes -- or, as in this case, breaks -- the team. In CDI, he portrayed -- albeit on the screen of fantasy -- that the players hardly matter, it is the coach and his strategies that matter in the end and he has applied this philosophy through Buchanan. But he seems to have forgotten completely that the game is actually played on the field -- not in the strategy session -- and it is the players who score runs, take wickets and finally win or lose a game. So now he has a whole team of coaches in addition to a team of players and the tooth-to-tail ratio, both in num...

I have been using Zoho at the Praxis Business School, Calcutta and have written about it in my blog posts Zoho : Amazing Web Based Applications and Zoho : The Continuing Saga but is great to know that the University of California at Berkeley has also woken up to the enchantment of this wonderful platform. Please see the presentation below.