Yantrakaal

A decade and a half ago, in the early days of outsourcing of software development, when clients in the US were sceptical about the feasibility of teams working across vast distances we had coined a term : Geography is History. What we meant to say was with the rapid advances in communication and collaboration technology, the geographic location of members of dispersed teams did not matter any more and dispersed organisations could be as productive and efficient as localised operations. In fact in an earlier blog post, I have hypothesised the possibility of actually Deconstructing the Corporation . While teleconferences, email, remote login, shared screens were all technologies that were used in these situations, the most coveted technology was video-conferencing. This was because the richness and intensity of the interaction was the highest with VC and yet because of bandwidth and other issues it was the most difficult exercise to actually execute upon. More often than not, it was th...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing the Pirates of the Caribbean : On Stranger Tides along with my son and was really impressed with the quality of the 3D technology. Not only was the spectacles that we used lighter but what was more important was that even with the 3D spectacles on, I did not have any difficulty in seeing the non 3D parts of the various movie trailers as well as the other people within the movie hall. Which sets me thinking -- what would happen if our normal spectacles were enhanced with this 3D capability ! Television manufacturers seem to very gung ho on 3D technology and most Japanese manufacturers ( are there any non-japanese manufacturers  ? ) have already placed their products in their market. A recent ad by Samsung claims that even non 3D content can be made into realistic 3D imagery with the press of a button and the use of the correct 3D spectacles. This could lead to an explosion of 3D content and if the success and quality of 3D movies in theatr...

When Kalyani Chaudhuri, the retired IAS officer from West Bengal started to write a book on the death of bureaucracy and governance, she thought that the Left Front Government would rule the state till the end of eternity. Her book -- When the Pendulum Stops -- recounts the depths of depravity to which a state can sink when it is ruled by one political party for a very long time. We are aware of one party dictatorships in the erstwhile USSR and in China but how is it that West Bengal with its periodic elections have had to share this fate ? Let us go back in time and look through a bit of history. The communist parties came into power on the basis of the general mis-governance perpetuated by the ruling Congress party in the 1970s and the first thing that they did to ensure their permanence in power was "Land Reforms". We have been told ad nauseum that because of these reforms the economic structure of rural Bengal was revitalised to such an extent that the generations ...

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...