Yantrakaal

1989 was a watershed year for both the world in general and me in particular. I had just finished my PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas and had decided to break the jinx of the X+1 syndrome and return to India. Those who have been a part of the desi community in the US in the last century would recollect this strange yearning of those who had finally arrived in the US, not just physically, but metaphorically as well, to give it all up and return to India. Nostalgia for home, sprinkled with a sense of guilt for having abandoned it, competed with la dolce vita, the good life, that America held out to the F-1 visa community of graduate students and it was always that the good life that won out. Most of F1 crowd would eventually get the Green Card, permanent immigrant status, and then become US citizens but they would always keep alive the delusion that next year, X+1, they will wind it all up and move back to India. It was a delusion because India was still stuck in socialist q...

Steve Case is such a big fan of Alvin Toffler’s 1980 classic, The Third Wave, that when he pens his own memoirs he gives it the same title. In his seminal work, Toffler had identified three distinct waves in the evolution of human society as the world moved from agriculture, through industry to become a post-industrial information driven society. Steve divides Toffler’s third wave -- the information phase -- into three sub-waves and then examines the third of this third in greater detail. In addition to being his memoirs, that chronicle the rise and fall of America Online, the company that really got Americans hooked to the internet, there are two other distinct themes that Steve has woven into this easy to read book. First he wants to be mentor and cheerleader for the entrepreneur who has an idea to change the world and does not know how to go about it. The second, and this is pet theme, is the distinction between the first, second and third waves, or sub-waves, of the internet dr...

This blog post will show you how to create a fairly decent website at a guaranteed lowest cost and that too without writing any code. Take a look. This post was originally written for iot-hub and the approach is currently being used at  Yantrajaal as well. However, when Yantrajaal was created in 1999 , none of these technologies existed and I had to take a more expensive route, that you do not need today. credit The first step to creating your, or  your company's, digital identity is to build a website. Most people begin by purchasing web hosting services either from a web hosting company or from a value added reseller and have them build their own website. While this may be fine, a do-it-yourself approach will get you going at the minimum possible cost. This post will tell you how you can do this. 1. Purchase a domain name, from a domain registrar like TierraNet or any other similar company. This will cost you around US$ 14 / year. You can get an absolutely free ...

Hadoop is history and Spark is the new kid on the block who is the darling of the Big Data community. Hadoop was unique. It was a pioneer that showed how "easy" it was to replace large, expensive server hardware with a collection, or cluster, of cheap, low end machines and crunch through gigabytes of data using a new programming style called Map-Reduce that I have explained elsewhere . But "easy" is a relative term. Installing Hadoop or writing the Java code for even simple Map-Reduce tasks was not for the faint hearted. So we had Hive and Pig to simplify matters. Then came tools like H20 and distributions like Hortonworks to make life even simpler for non-Geeks  who wanted to focus purely on the data science piece without having to bother about technology. But as I said, with the arrival of Spark, all that is now history! Spark was developed at the University of California at Berkeley and appeared on the horizon for data scientists in 2013 at an O'Reilly ...

The IIT KGP Pre 1993 group in a facebook was created as a reaction and rebuff to the official IIT KGP Alumnus group that had become a hotbed of political and religious bigotry. The Pre 1993 crowd is believed to be more of the "kool kgp type" and even if some of them do have strong views on political and religious matters, such things are kept aside in this group. Posts in this group are more in the form of happy reminiscences that the old men like to tell, listen to and enjoy. Since it is difficult to search through Facebook posts, I have created these pointers to the stories that I had contributed to this column. But to respect the privacy of the closed group where these stories were pointed, I have made sure that only members can read the whole story -- and the incredible comments that other members have made. 6th July 2015 Sometime in the recent past,  Surath Chatterjee , like many of us, reached his 50th year and some of his friends had thrown a party for him a...

When I think back about it, the New Delhi that I had visited as a child in the late 1960s was so much cleaner, nicer and better than the city I occasionally go to today. As a tourist in Europe in the late 1980s I did not have to think about the terror, and counter-terror, that is now being unleashed in Brussels and Paris. The Kolkata that I live in today is an urban disaster compared to the Calcutta that I went to school in. It is difficult to deny that, net-net, there has been a decay and degradation in the quality of urban life over the past 50 years. Is it only in urban life? And is it only for the past 50 years? The dry statistics captured by economists in the Human Development Index -- a vector consisting of life expectancy, education and per-capita income -- and talked about by governments in power would claim that the world is becoming a better place. But the common man in the bazaars of India, and perhaps the world as well, would beg to differ. With his native intelligence,...

Two generations