Yantrakaal

In the chequered history of parliamentary legislation in India, the RTI Act stands out as a significant milestone that puts activities of the government under public scrutiny. But even though the Act gives a legitimate platform for citizens to ask questions on, the process is cumbersome and answers are often given in a manner that is not easy to understand or make use of. But why must a citizen have to ask for something that is his by birthright? Why can the information not be released automatically? But then who decides what information is to be released? At what level of detail? At what frequency? The biggest challenge facing India is corruption. It is the mother of all problems because it leads to and exacerbates all other problems. If controlled, the money saved can be used to address most deficiencies in health, education and other social sectors. Misguided people wrongly believe that having a strong Lokpal will solve the problem but when bodies as powerful as the CB...

[Note]   -- Hadoop, IMHO, is history. Rather than waste time with all this, suggest you check up my blog post on  Spark with Python . Hadoop is a conceptual delight and an architectural marvel. Anybody who understands the immense challenge of crunching through a humungous amount of data will appreciate the way it transparently distributes the workload across multiple computers and marvel at the elegance with which it does so. image from nextgendistribution.com Thirty years after my first tryst with data -- as relational database management systems that I had come across at the University of Texas at Dallas -- my introduction to Hadoop was an eye opener into a whole new world of data processing. Last summer, I managed to Demystify Map Reduce and Hadoop by installing it on Ubuntu and running a few Java programs but frankly I was more comfortable with Pig and Hive that allowed a non-Java person -- or pre-Java dinosaur -- like me to perform meaningful tasks with Map-R...

The Chief Election Commissioner has recently stated that the EC is planning to use web and mobile based technology to allow citizens to cast their vote in local and national elections. Is this feasible? Will it be fair? Or secure? The challenge is indeed daunting but let us see how we can leverage an existing technology infrastructure to reach this goal easily and at a very low cost. Online voting is not a new idea. The Computer Society of India and many public limited companies are already using the internet to allow members and shareholders to vote by logging into websites. The challenge is to make sure that only those who are authorised to vote are allowed to login to the site and this is ensured by sending unique userids and passwords by email. Obviously this assumes that every member of the electorate has a valid and validated email ID. But this would not be true when we consider the kind of people who are voting in panchayat, municipal,  state legislature and Lok Sabha ...

This year, all of a sudden and perhaps for the first time since I have been visiting the Rabindra Sarovar in south Calcutta, we have had a small flock of painted storks staying over in the little island in the middle of the lake. Initially, I thought that they had come from Siberia or some other very cold place but it seems that is not quite true. They are native to India. this map shows the island where the pictures were taken

Folklore celebrates Shivaratri as the marriage of Lord Shiva with Parvati, the daughter of the Himalayan mountains. The consummation of this marriage is viewed in learned circles as the Yoga, or union, of Shiva with his Shakti. Of the Purusha with his Prakriti. Shiva is the Potential energy of the universe and Shakti is its manifestation in Kinetic form. From Sankara to Vivekananda, adepts have likened Shiva to the Ocean and Shakti to the waves that rise from it and settle back. But then again there is another perspective! Shiva is not a God, not even a god, in the traditional dualistic perspective of a devotee and the object of devotion. Shiva is a quality, the quality of "good", as understood in the phrase, "Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram" -- the triad of the the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Truth is viewed as function of rational analysis as in the search for the truth. This is the way of the West -- of Egypt, Greece, the Renaissance and modernity. This has...

We all know about the Andamans from our history books but rarely do we get the opportunity to experience the geography of this very picturesque part of India. Here is a short, photographic record of our visit to this little visited part of India. We arrived in Port Blair and walked into the pages of the history book that tells us about the Cellullar jail where so many freedom fighters, ( or "terrorists" from the British point of view) were incarcerated or even martyred. the outside of the jail inside the jail, during the Sound and Light Show inside one of the cells the long corridor along one of the wings view from the roof from the watch tower   these were the actual gallows where prisoners were executed and the picture below shows the oil mill that prisoners had to operate to produce their quota of coconut oil two of the jail wings from the watch tower   this is the room were Veer Savarkar was incarcera...