Yantrakaal

Unless you are Rip Van Winkle who has just woken up from long sleep, it is very unlikely that you would be unaware of how social media frenzy has been and is sweeping through the ecosystem. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube is the new trinity that everyone is interested in, not the Brahma-Vishnu-Maheshwar or the Father-Son-HolyGhost that our ancestor talked about. While usage and consumption of social media is what most of us are interested in, social scientists and market research professionals have a deeper interest in this amazing phenomenon. In the past, such research was carried out through traditional tools like questionnaires but given the vast quantity of data and the speed with which it changes we need newer and better tools. As a part of the curriculum of the MBA program at the Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur students were required to explore and present newer tools -- that are legitimately available at no cost -- for extracting and analysing social media da...

Tax free bonds have always been very popular in India. In the good old days of the distant past we had RBI “Relief Bonds” that offered up to 10% tax free income but it was never quite sure for whose relief the bonds were for -- perhaps for the Indian tax payer! That was then. Now we have similar bonds floated by  IIFCL and NHAI, albeit at far lower rates that vary between 6.5% and 8.3% but even these have garnered Rs 30,000 crores in FY 11-12. Carried away by this appetite for tax free bonds, the finance minister has proposed to float similar bonds to the tune of Rs 60,000 crores in the next fiscal. But where could or should this money be used ? The NHAI has of course been building roads but I think there is another piece of critical infrastructure that can be funded through this route -- education ! Why ? Because education is the mother of all infrastructure that this country needs very badly.. For a variety of reasons not directly attributable to government ...

If justice delayed is justice denied then the citizens of India have had no justice for many years. We all know that court cases in India drag on for years while litigants grow old and die or settle out of court. For those who are entangled in criminal cases the situation is worse because more often than not a significant part of their lives are wasted behind the bars of overcrowded jails. One estimate of the size of the problem says that in 2009 there were 30 million court cases pending all over the country. What is worse is that there is no solution in sight ! Or is it ? Let us first redefine the judiciary as a mechanism to deliver judicial services where judges, who are paid by the Indian tax payer, are service providers and the litigants are the customers or consumers. In fact these customers pay for the services either directly through court fees or indirectly through the taxes. The moment we redefine the litigant as a consumer then he is eligible for protection under the...

I have been a laggard with smartphones but last month I finally bought an Android phone and within days I got a tidy return on my small investment -- two extra hours on the upper berth of an overnight train ! How ? If you are travelling alone at night, in an AC compartment then you have no way to knowing where you are at any point in time and the need to climb down every now and then to check the station that you are passing through is painful. Instead what I did was to lie on the bunk and switch on Google Maps on my GPS enabled Android phone and watched the blue arrow that showed me (and the train) as it snaked across the countryside. Only after passing the last station before my destination, did I finally get down from bunk feeling rather smug about this new technology. This simple technology can be used to track the movement of all trains across the entire country. How ? Every Android phone is associated with a specific Gmail ID and using this Gmail ID one can “check-in” i...

Chandidas was one of the most well known poets of medieval Bengal and his SriKrishna Kirtan -- a lyrical account of the story of Radha and Krishna -- is an iconic milestone in the growth of development of the Bengali language. Yesterday, we had the pleasure of visiting Nanoor, in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, where Chandidas was born. Here are some pictures.   The road leading to the ancestral house of the poet. The modern gate carries one of the poet's ringing assertion of humanism -- above all, it is in humanity that one can find the essence of all truth.     The Archaeological Survey of India assert the authenticity of the relics that are now associated with the poet.   A terrocotta Shiva Temple   The small, non-descript temple of Bishalkshi or Basuli Devi whom the poet adored in the form of Saraswati, the Patron Goddess of Literature and the Fine Arts  Two pictures (above and below ) of the m...

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Government funded institutes and colleges in India are certainly far from being in the pink of health. Even the premier institutes of technology and management fall far short of international standards but if one were to say so in public, as only well known people like Narayan Murthy and Jairam Ramesh can afford to do, he or she will be mocked, humiliated and shouted down. But why do we say this ? The fame of the IITs and IIMs rests neither on the faculty nor on their research output but on the students and alumni.  In fact the only real value that these institutes bring to the table is the rigour of their admission process, namely the JEE (now discredited because of coaching classes and being discontinued ) and the CAT. Not much value is added after that. In terms of research, the less said the better. Even a cursory investigation into this unfortunate state of affairs will reveal that the real problem is the poor state of the underlying management and administrative mechanism ...