Yantrakaal

at the Public Relations Society of India, Kolkata Chapter, annual event at the ITC Sonar, Calcutta on 22nd June 2013, where I spoke about Personal TV Channels

I know that Social Media is the toast of the town but boy, am I getting tired of it ! You may say that I am being a hypocrite, since I post regularly on Twitter (hence automatically by  passthrough on Facebook ) and Linkedin, but I will be frank and admit that I do so more out of habit and perhaps out of a misplaced sense of necessity. Habit is understandable. At Level 4 of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one needs esteem, the acceptance by one's peers and it does give you a kick if your post is liked and commented upon by a small band of people who form a mutual appreciation society. Of course, the key word in the last sentence is mutual -- if you want your posts to be liked and commented upon, then you have to return the favour as well and this is where the habit part kicks in. But other than casual chit-chat or  twitter (the guys who created this phenomenon, could not have named it any better) I doubt if social media has any purpose other than to keep an idle mind busy ! ...

Today, on Facebook, I came across another wisecrack comment on the dim prospects of the Indian software industry. Someone was taking another cheap potshot at Infosys ( and similar IT companies for that matter ) for working at the low end of the value chain. Coding, cyber coolies and what not. Why can the Indian software companies not "move up the value chain" and develop products that leverage intellectual property and not merely cost arbitrage ? Good question. And it is not that this question is being asked for the first time and so it is unlikely that the issue is not known to the management of the IT companies. Having been at a reasonable senior position in the IT industry I know for sure that many of my colleagues and contemporaries were seized of the matter. But being seized of the matter is different from being able to do something about it and unfortunately most attempts to do anything different ended up in failure. Why ? Because we as a nation suffer from an unbe...

Bitcoin is a new "currency" that has caught the imagination of the world and I thought it may be worthwhile to step in and see what it looks like. But before that what is Bitcoin ? A Google search on the topic will lead to lots of fairly detailed explanations but let me summarize what I have understood so far. It is more like a commodity, like gold or guar seeds, that are being traded at a price dictated by the demand and supply in the market. Since it is a digital artifact, it is being "mined" or "created", by running a computer program -- that consumes time, power and CPU cycles -- and seeing if the result meets certain requirements. Think of it as if you are asked to locate the next prime number. These requirements are defined "collaboratively" by a federation of computer servers located on the internet. So unlike a Central Bank there is no single body that controls the supply Bitcoins. Anyone can join this federation by installin...

Gangani is an unusually picturesque place on the banks of the Shilabati River, near Garhbeta, West Midnapur, West Bengal. Here erosion by water has created strange earth and rock formations on the banks of the river and the red colour of the soil gives the place an eerie look. The following slide show will help explain what we are talking about. Some people refer to this place as the Grand Canyon of Bengal but of course in terms of size, the place is miniscule compared to the original in the US. This is what the place looks like in Wikimapia