Yantrakaal

Today, when Dhoni and his band of merry men are the toast of the town after their brilliant win against the Sri Lanka, it is impossible for me to not recollect an equally brilliant win pulled of by Kapil's Devils at Lords in 1983. I have recorded my feelings of that incredible day on the silver jubilee celebration of that historic win in another post and I do not wish to repeat it once again here. But as I plumbed the nostalgic depths of my memory -- and the bottom drawer of my desk, I came across this wonderful piece of memorabilia that I wish to share with my friends and also saveit  for me and my posterity. Yes, that is Kapil Dev's autograph on a ticket for an India match at Lords but no, it is not THAT historic match. This was later, in 2004 when I had been invited by my client British Petroleum to their box at Lords and yes, India led by Sourav Ganguly did win against England that day. But the best part of the match was my meeting with the hero of my student days -- t...

  THE CALM: Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated. THE DIGNITY: Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture. THE ABILITY: The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall. THE GRACE: People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something. THE ORDER: No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just understanding. THE SACRIFICE: Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid? THE TENDERNESS: Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak. THE TRAINING: The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that. THE MEDIA: They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage. THE CONSCIENCE: When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves & left q...

Science fiction writers and movie makers have long talked about robots evolving to the point of dominating the world and human society. Fortunately this has not yet happened and the possibility of it happening in the near future is quite low. On the other hand, machine generated mass mail -- spam -- has increased to a point where they constitute 98% of the total email ecosystem and can dominate and destroy this very useful service unless one takes special care to keep them at bay. Social bots are an emerging phenomenon that may climb out of the success seen with spams in email and reach out towards what what was considered impossible -- the domination of real human ecosystem. A bot by itself is no big news. Bot -- an abbreviation for a software robot -- is a computer program that imitates human behaviour in certain circumstances. For example you can create a bot, a searchbot, to search the web and report on the best prices for a particular product across various online stores. This...

Baul's are an integral part of the landscape of Birbhum and their haunting music lends enchantment to any evening. On the occasion of Dol Yatra ( or Holi -- for non Bengalis ) we had the pleasure of listening to Gautam Baul as he held forth with his mellifluous tunes under a full moon. What was even more remarkable was that the full moon on this date -- 19th March 2011 -- was also a supermoon, when the Moon is closest to the Earth. 

In the little town of Dubrajpur, near Shantiniketan, Birbhum, West Bengal, there is an area called the "Mama Bhagne Pahar" that is scattered with a large number of huge boulders. Obviously, these are very old rocks, most likely to be remnants of a basaltic pipe that would have pushed through some cracks on the surface of the earth many many years ago. Since then the ravages of time and weather have removed the softer soil leaving the hard rocks standing naked on the ground.  Subsequently aeons of heating and cooling have cracked the rocks leaving them in odd shapes for people like us see and wonder. Here are some pictures of the place Unfortunately, like most places of tourist interest, the entire area is dirty and ill-kept. There is garbage and rubbish everywhere though there has been some sporadic effort to create a park out of this natural bounty but the results are very disappointing.  One of these huge boulders has been sanctified as Lord Shiva -- in the avata...

Like the fifth postulate of Euclid, the twelfth chapter of this book has been a source of discomfort both for me as well as for some of my friends and readers. The need to introduce the Divine to plug a loophole in my logic – an inevitable loophole, given the limitations of the Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness – was rather irritating and yet it seemed that there is nothing I could do about it. Then I met a friend who alerted me to the existence of a very simple concept that was functionally analogous and one that would allow me to bridge the gap. But does it work ? and have I succeeded in doing so ? That question is best answered by the reader I suppose. Technology has moved significantly since the first edition and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of 3D displays. Direct connectivity between the human brain and a digital device has also improved dramatically but we are yet to reach the level of maturity that is necessary to blur the border between the real and illusor...