Abhinav Agarwal

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

State of Fear by Michael Crichton (Kindle e-book, Flipkart)

The book is like other Cricton novels in that it is eminently readable, fast paced, and the focus more on the plot and action than the characters. Some of the characters are not that well etched out, and stand out as near superhuman—like Sarah, Jennifer, or the NSIA agent plus MIT professor plus 007 on duty dude who is also upto date on every known and knowable fact on global warming (or climate change as you choose).

The book also makes the claim, backed by copious footnotes, facts, and references provided at the end of the book, that the whole theory and crescendo of near-paranoia surrounding global warming and the impact that it is having on climate change, does not seem to be borne of facts or scientific observations made over several decades. It does make a person pause for thought. Especially when towards the end of the book, a character conveniently placed for the sake of providing some context to the name of the book - State of Fear - describes that the modern Industrial Military complex needs to create a state of fear with which to control society.

The book seems to be tailor written for conversion into a $150 million summer blockbuster screenplay - wonder whether one is not already in the works...

The New Orleans flooding last year, tsunami in India and sout east Asia in 2004, and other events in the last few years - do suggest that the climate is changing. How much of it is human influenced is something to study more, I guess.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Barista Koramangala

Barista in Koramangala - combine a fairly quiet environment for coffee, a newly acquired digital camera and the realization that the marginal cost of taking photos is close to zero, and you have lots of shots of coffee cups, with coffee.

A zoom lens would have made me happier - I tend to obsess over that a lot in my blog postings I think.. Hmm...

I find it fascinating how they make these nice looking patterns with the cream. The moment you add sugar and stir it is gone. If you stir your coffee it's gone. Why have this pattern then?

Brown sugar is better than refined sugar. No sugar is even better. Though seeing the teanspoonfuls of sugar that people put in their coffee makes you wonder if maybe sugar was not going out of fashion, or maybe drinking coffee was really a very roundabout way of ingesting sugar.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

No Nuisance Here

"Please do not commit nuisance here" - prudishness meets well.... you can see for yourself.

Nuisance kind of keeps it vague and can include acts not quite intended by the sign.... btw - this is near the Ranka Colony on Bannerghatta Road.

Sunday, August 6, 2006

Amazon Pricing

As many, many surveys have revealed - people do not mind paying a little more at a store as long as they feel that everyone else is paying that much more at the store. If a store, surreptitiously, charges some less and some more, that pisses off people no end.

A couple of months back (I am trying to clear off some posts that have been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time) I was quite stunned to see Amazon.com display two different prices for the same item, within 5 seconds of each other, the higher price on a browser where I was logged in with my "Amazon Prime" account, and the lower price on a browser where I was not logged in.

Refreshing the page to clear any cache related issues did not help.
You have to start thinking just where else has Amazon shafted me...

See for yourself:

On Firefox, and on Internet Explorer - same machine, within 5 seconds of each other.
Repeated on another machine, not logged in. Lower price displayed for the same URL.

Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat

Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT by Chetan Bhagat
(Buy Five Point Someone: What Not To Do At IIT from Flipkart.com, Kindle e-book)

3 stars

Finished reading "Five Point Someone" in June. This book is acquiring somewhat of a neo-cult following among some sections of the urban educated class in India, partly because this happens to be possibly the first work of fiction set in the campus setting of an IIT.

The book is fairly readable, owing partly to the fact that it is less than 300 pages long. Also the fact that it has a sprinkling of most ingredients one expects to find in a pulp-fiction thriller. For someone looking for an insight into the secret sauce of IITs and the amazing success that it students have chalked up over the decades, this is not the book. It will disappoint. The book however does, should, strike a chord with most students or near pre or post college years in India. The ending is a bit hokey, with the Hari's dream downright melodramatic, as if the author realized he really did not have a proper ending to the book, and therefore had to resort to this stunt. Otherwise, you shall find a bit of everything in the novel - friendship, rivalry, intrigue, suspense, love, sex, proper Hindi movie style family melodrama, and most other ingredients that one would find in a Hindi potboiler.

If you read some of the reviews on Amazon.com you may feel the book is a lot worse than it is - and that is probably because people are either taking the book or themselves too seriously. And yes, the book does also take a dig at some of the bookworms, the "muggus" - which also may not sit too well with some "muggu" brethren. To be fair, these "ghota-totas" are also some of the same people who make it big in life, so to portray them as people-without-a-life is a tad unfair, bit that is a liberty the author takes - grant him that creative license.

In the end, take the bookwithout any tags attached to it - read it in 3 hours or less and be done with it.

Here is the synopsis of the book and author fromthe book site:

Set in IIT, in the early '90s, Five Point Someone portrays the lives of the protagonist Hari and his two friends Ryan and Alok. It explores the darker side of IIT, one in which students- having worked for years to make it into the institute-struggle to maintain their grades, keep their friends and have some kind of life outside studies.
Funny, dark and non-stop, Five Point Someone is the story of three friends whose measly five-point something GPAs come in the way of everything-their friendship, their love life, their future. Will they make it?
Chetan Bhagat graduated from IIT, Delhi in 1995. He then did an MBA at IIM, Ahmedabad, from where he graduated in 1997. Bhagat currently lives in Hong Kong and works at a prominent US investment bank. Apart from writing, Bhagat also has a keen interest in yoga.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Bannerghatta National Park

This is the Bannerghatta Road, a state highway, beyond Meenakshi Temple, and as you can see, the road is not bad, it's at least paved.

You have to take a right on Bannerghatta Road some 6-8 kms from Meenakshi Temple, and then drive a couple of kms through a village.

A buffalo letting a crow treat itself to a snack of worms is a photo op not to be missed. A camera with a zoom lens would have made for a more satisfying photo. Well... someday

The entrance to the park. You do not enter through the gate on the right, but drive straight ahead where the ticket counters and main gate are.

This is a closeup of the gate seen in the earlier photo. You can see the timings, and see that the zoo is closed on Tuesdays. I didn't see any postcard shops around, but if carry a polaroid camera you could post an instant card courtesy the post box seen in the corner.

This is where you buy a parking ticket. The venerable old man sitting on the chair kept on giving that enigmatic look the entire time I paid for the ticket and snapped this photo.

Not really something to write home about; this row of shops could be made into something so much more, but this is Karnataka for you. A nice national park so close to a large city like Bangalore, and this is the best that our planners can manage. You can however get a 'bhutta' for five rupees. Lots of shops also sell photo rolls for those who still live have not moved to the world of digital cameras.

And here is the fare card for you - lots of options, you can see the zoo only, or go on a grand safari that packages a tiger safari, lion safari, Bear safari, a herbivore safari, and entrance to the zoo, all for 85 rupees per person.

A map of the zoo tells you that there is a KSTDC hotel proposed near the park. There is also a pre-historic animal park that we did not go to - next time.

The ticket counter - at 10 AM there is no line (queue) and even inside the biological park there were less than 30 visitors - an ideal time to visit one would argue.

And the 'Q' for the different safaris are also empty. Partly because the first buses leaves only at 10:30AM.

They are quite strict about educating people about not littering the place with plastic, which is quite commendable. And truth be told, I did not find plastic bags littering the place. I would like to know if people are actually fined or prosecuted for littering the place...

By far the funniest sign in the whole park - the signage is in Kannada, but you don't need know what's been written to know that people are being told not to tease animals in cages. So while the lion has the man's leg in his mouth, and the elephant has his trunk in the man's mouth, and the monkey is pulling the dude's hair, the bear seems content to watch the show...

Caiman crocodiles. And none of them shedding tears.

Monkeys above the queue for the bus rides. More photos later.

Sunday, July 2, 2006

Kargil Hilton

The Kargil Hilton in Bangalore - yes, that's right. This is neither Kargil, nor is this a Hilton by any stretch of the imagination. And to top it all, this is Bangalore - Southend Road in Basavangudi to be precise. And to hell with trademarks and copyrights. I am sure the proprietor's last name is not Hilton either.

Oracle Travel, Really?

Oracle campus as a travel vendor?? No, not quite. This is just some innovative fella who decided that the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores would make for a nice shop hoarding. I found out this is a travel vendor, so in some ways it makes sense - after all, who wouldn't want to travel to Redwood Shores? Nice glass buildings, with a nice lake frontage. Sounds like a vacation idea, doesn't it?

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Prey by Michael Crichton

Prey by Michael Crichton (Flipkart, Kindle e-book)

5 stars

Just finished reading Michael Crichton's 'Prey' (see book page on Amazon.com, link to book page on Michael's web site). Compared with the last fiction novel I read - Baldacci's The Winner (link on Amazon.com) - this is a far, far better written and researched book. "Prey" holds your interest, has a good plot, and the pace is well maintained. The details at times may bore those uninterested in the minutaue, but the technical gore is kept to a minimum. The pace at which the bio-engineered nanoparticles evolve is a bit too fast to be entirely plausible, or the level of sophistication that they become capable of within a few weeks, but is well presented to make it at least a little bit plausible.

Kindle Excerpt:

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Sex and advertising

Sex in advertising - Sometime last year in September 2005 I had posted a photo on sex in advertising Sex in Advertising, where I posted the "before" photos. I realized I never posted the after photo. Here it is. The entire campaign was for a fitness gym. Go figure.

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

Cog vs Crucial Cog

C|Net had a story, "India becoming a cog in IBM's machine" (link to article on C|Net), that originally appeared in the New York Times (link to article on NYTimes.com), but headlined "India becoming a crucial cog in IBM's machine" - the word "crucial" has been omitted from the C|Net story, possibly for reasons of clarity, brevity? What difference does it make? A cog is a cog is a cog. Crucial, dispensable, incidental - it's all the same!

Anyway, here are some snippets from the article:

"On Tuesday, on the expansive grounds of the Bangalore Palace, a colonial-era mansion once inhabited by a maharajah, the chairman and chief executive of IBM, Sam Palmisano, will address 10,000 Indian employees. He will share the stage with A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, India's president, and Sunil Mittal, chairman of the country's largest cellular services provider, Bharti Tele-Ventures. An additional 6,500 employees will look in on the town hall-style meeting by satellite from other Indian cities."

"IBM is growing not only in size by adding new hires, but also in revenue. The company's business in India grew 61 percent in the first quarter of this year, 55 percent in 2005 and 45 percent the year before."

"From 9,000 employees in early 2004, the number has grown to 43,000 (out of 329,000 worldwide), making IBM the country's largest multinational employer."

Business Today also had a cover story in its May 21 2006 issue, titled "The Race To $10 Billion" (paid login required to read article), that detailed the chances of the big three of making it to $10 billion - TCS, Infosys, Wipro.

Reposted to this blog, Dec 2013.

Monday, June 5, 2006

Wockhardt Hospital

Wockhardt hospital on Bannerghatta Road - opposite the Indian Institute of Management and before the HSBC office and Mantri Paradise is where the latest addition on Bannerghatta Road is coming up - Wockhardt Hospital, which is also listed as an affiliate hospital of Harvard Medical International. The Harvard crest is as prominent as the Wockhardt sign. Wonder what the cost of medical service will be here. What makes things interesting is that the site adjacent to Wockhardt is where Apollo Hospital is coming up. Now people will know that there is a Sagar Apollo hospital already present on Bannerghatta Road, some 3 kms north, near Dairy Cirlce. So Bannerghatta Road will now have four major hospitals, the fourth one being the Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology.

Another photo of Wockhardt hospital on Bannerghatta Road - I forgot that to send multiple photos to Blogger via Hello I have to use the pipe character... well... anyway. Here is the second photo. See my previous post on more about this hospital. See this page -http://hmi.harvard.edu/hmi_partners/partners/wockhardt.php - that briefly describes the nature of Harvard Medical International's affiliation with Wockhardt Hospitals. The Wockhardt Hospitals web site is at http://www.wockhardtin.com/ (hope these URLs are converted into hyperlinks by Hello...

Ebony Restaurant

View from Ebony restaurant on MG Road - this is the view of MG Road and the parade grounds from Ebony rooftop restaurant in the Barton center. And the food isn't bad either. On weekends the buffet is priced at Rs 250 per head. You have to get there before 1pm to get seating, lest you wait.

Sunday, June 4, 2006

Opal Mehta

Who is Opal Mehta? Read her Wikipedia entry (accessed Dec 31, 2013).

The Opal Mehta book on Queen's Road this Saturday. I think this is not a pirated version. I was tempted to pick it up, for posterity, but didn't. I don't think anyone will remember Kavya after a few months. The phrase "internalizing" may be the butt of some jokes for some time, but even that will pass. The young plagiarist will be forgotten... So why waste a hundred rupees or so? It's interesting to see however how keyed in are these street vendors on what is hot and what is more likely to sell.

Reposted to this blog, Dec 2013.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Google Book Scanning

A fairly long and detailed look (link) in the New York Times dated May 14 2006 at the project to scan all books, or at least those whose copyright is in the public domain, by Google and others. The article is broken up into eight sections, or online pages - 1. Scanning the Library of Libraries, 2. What Happens When Books Connect, 3. Books: The Liquid Version, 4. The Triumph of the Copy, 5. The Moral Imperative to Scan, 6. The Case Against Google, 7. When Business Models Collide, and 8. Search Changes Everything.

I think digitization is a boon in many ways as it would make available books geographically inaccessible or hard to find because they are out of print - I for example purchased a couple of books from Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the US because they are difficult if not outright to purchase in India. But at the same time I have this serious misgiving that the end goal ultimately is to make access to this content filtered through a payment gateway so that you shall never ever really own a book, but merely rent the right to read or browse it when you want. Something like the difference between owning a DVD of a movie versus watching it on pay-per-view or renting it from a library. Does anyone remember Divx - that Disney, Circuit City and others conjured up in 1998?

Monday, May 15, 2006

St Louis, 1997

Where was I in 1997 - who cares? Ok, let's be nice - this is my blog and I shall post on whatever suits my fancy. This is where I worked for a little over a year, from 1996 to 1997. In the background you can see the Gateway Arch, 630 feet high, and a midwest landmark. While most Americans know about the Gateway Arch, most Indians probably do not. On the right is the Busch stadium (St Louis is where Anheuser Busch is headquartered...). Towards the left you will find three buildings of SBC. The tallest one nearest you is their main building, there is a shorter building after that, which is their data center. The black building you see is (or at least used to be) Cap Gemini's offices. Don't know if that's still true or not. Harrah's and a few other casinos offer river-boat gambling on large boats, more like ships, anchored by the river. And before you go and say 'ah-haa!! he has not taken this photo', let me say that yes, I did not take this photo. This is a postcard of St Louis.

The photos below however are all mine

This is the Gateway Arch below. If I were to go there again, which I doubt, I would love to spend an entire day in the downtown St Louis area and shoot a couple of hundred photos there (yeah - if you can't get quality, go for quantity)

As you can tell from the date stamp on the photo (look at the top right corner), I took this photo in Feb 1997. This is an exhibit inside the Old Courthouse (see the end of this post for some Wikipedia links) where the history of St Louis is traced. Some fascinating nuggets about this old river town (old by American standards that is) can be seen in this timeline:

The first kindergarten in the US was setup in St Louis.

At the turn of the century (that would be 1899, not 1999) St Louis was the fourth largest city in the US. Even more, it had the world's largest railroad station (it's still there, though now a shopping center in it), hardware house, drug house, and tobacco factories.

You can also learn that it was the year 1876 when the first Budweiser beer was brewed, here in St Louis.

Clearing snow off your car is a chore one learns quickly in the midwest. Unlike California where most drivers never ever get to experience the pleasure of scraping snow off the front of their cars, in St Louis it was a frequent enough task during the winter that I actually became efficient at it! The worst however is when there is freezing rain. It forms a thick coat of ice on your car, and you can no longer brush it off your car. You have to start your car, switch on the heater at full speed, set it to defrost mode, step out of the car, and spend the next twenty minutes literally hacking away at the ice. Yes, this is fun...

Reposted to this blog, Dec 2013.

Monday, May 1, 2006

RK Laxman

An RK Laxman gem, after a long time, from the May 1st 2006 Times of India.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Praful Bidwai, the idiot

I have a deep dislike for people who make a career out of disparaging India, its achievements, its heritage, culture, and history. Especially when those people are Indians. It makes you wonder just what is wrong with these people that they hate their own country so deeply. Just how much poison is there that is running in place of blood in their bodies that they make a career out of running down your own country in front of the whole world (it would be equally reprehensible to do it in private also).

Praful Bidwai (Wikipedia), by all indications and his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, seems to be one of those people. Now there are few things more distasteful than actually sitting down and reading his columns, but I actually did that, and here is a sampling of his writings. They go beyond, far beyond the limits of what could be considered as taking a contrarian view, of providing healthy criticism, that is so important in a democracy. His focus is obsessively on those things that can be used to run down India, its achievements, belittle its achievers, be they in the sphere of IT or other spheres of life.

He claims that the BJP was not a national party because it won less than a third of the seats in Parliament. Nowhere is he willing to accord the same status to the Congress, which also won less than a third of the seats in parliament in the 2004 general elections.
At the drop of a hat he labels the Shiv Sena as a fascist party. While I do not have too many problems with that labelling as I think the Shiv Sena is a ridiculous party of basically chauvinist good-for-nothings, what I would love to see this champion of India to the Muslim League a fascist party. Or such bigots as Banatwalla as traitors. Not a chance.
When historical , literary, and basic archaelogical evidence pointed out to the existence of a temple under the Babri Masjid, the likes of Praful Bidwai were quick to whitewash such evidence as fabrications of a lunatic right-wing. When surveys ordered by the Supreme Court turned up conclusive evidence of the existence of a temple where the Babri Masjid had existed, he labelled the exercise as 'voodoo archaelogy'. Talk about name calling out of spite. Classic communist propoganda: when you can't fight facts, malign the person and everyone who associates with the person or the facts. Actually, Goebbels (link to Wikipedia) perfected the art of propaganda, and the communists in India seemingly take him to be their idol.
It is a well known and documented fact that West Bengal is a state that encourages and witnesses huge illegal immigration from Bangaldesh. Most of the times it is with the active connivance and even participation of the communist parties' rank and file cardre. This has serious implications for the national security of India. I would love to hear Bidwai condemn the Left government in West Bengal (after all, haven't they been ruling the state for decades?) in much the same words he condemned the Maharashtra government when it tried to deport a few dozen illegal Bangladeshis from its state.
He had a ton of hatred for the BJP and Hindutva and the Gujarat riots. The Gujarat riots were shameful on two counts: the fact that a crime of such horrific proportions as the burning of innocent women and children at Godhra could happen, and the fact that the riots that broke out after that. Interesting... Did he have anything similar to say when Hindus were hacked to death in Kerala in a calculated move by some people to instigate communal riots in the state? Or when the Congress party and its beloved leader, Rajiv Gandhi, oversaw the systematic murder of thousands of Sikhs in the country? Or the fact that every politician associated with that act of inhumanity got rewarded by ministerial posts in the Congress government for years to come? Does he even bother to remember the now infamous phrase that went something like 'when a tree falls...'?
When Bidwai talks about the 'detoxification' of the educational institutions, does he care to comment on the venality and corruption of communist historians like Irfan Habib (who acted as the PhD guide for a student who copied, word for word, the work of another historian and passed it on as his own), Romila Thapar (who can't read a word of Sanskrit yet acts as an expert on ancient Indian history), Panicker (who took lakhs and lakhs of money for research that he never conducted or submitted to the government), and more. All of these historians have over decades, implanted them inside all government supported educational and cultural institutions, propped each other up to create a clique, took money from the government for research they never conducted, outputted work of egregious quality, and yet trumpet themselves as 'historians'.
It speaks immensely of Bidwai's abilities or lack of them in judging character that he praised Natwar Singh as a man with strong non-aligned perspectives. Hmm.. the only thing he was non-aligned was on where he took money from. Remember the oil for money scam where he proclaimed indgnantly that he N-E-V-E-R took money? Maybe Bidwai and his ilk's motto seems to be, 'theives of the world unite!'
He stated that Arafat had 'never been an obstacle to peace, rather a precondition for it'. Hmm... does anyone remember that when Israelis offered the Palestinians 94% of the land that they had demanded and compensation for the rest, Arafat had rejected it with enough venom and idiocy to rival Bidwai himself. And that almost every commentator the world over had started stating that Arafat had become the biggest towards peace in the region. Not to mention that Arafat was also accused of embezzling funds that his organization received as donations towards the 'Intifada', and Arafat's personal fortune was estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars. So much for Bidwai's acuity of perception.
Bidwai's manic delusions reach epic proportions when he claims that the the Left has made 'historic contributions to building institutions and values that even the liberals cherish...'. Hmm... venality, corruption, fascination with everything un-Indian, collaboration with the British against the Congress during the freedom movement, calling Subhash Chandra Bose as the 'running dog of the imperialists', calling Mahatma Gandhi as the 'worst force in Indian politics today', taking money from the Soviets during the socialist era... Yes, these are historical contributions, but not quite the same kind as Bidwai would like to remember them as.

Finally, one may say that the treachery of the communists does in no way lessen the crime of others. True, very true. And I am all for punishing all those who cheat and steal from India. And every single thief punished is a thief reduced from society. In that spirit, can we start with detoxifying India of communists? That will be like eliminating in one fell swoop the biggest cancer that has afflicted India for decades now. Then go on to such creatures as Deve Gowda, Mayawati, Laloo Prasad, Mayawati, Sonia Gandhi, Shiv Sena, and all those Congress and BJP MPs that took money to pose questions in Parliament? It may mean sending to prison almost all our elected MPs and MLAs, but it would be a start... Then there are the esteemed IAS, IPS, IFS, IRS, and other equally distinguished bureaucrats. Tens of thousands of such people would need to be sent for the rest of their natural lives to prison for the tens of thousands of crore rupees that this breed has siphoned away for decades.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

I am underpaid

Cognitive dissonance...
Looking at Infosys' FY 05 annual report confirmed what I had been suspecting for many months now - I am severly, grossly, underpaid. I must really like my work (which I do... so what am I complaining about)

Friday, March 31, 2006

Graduation, IIM Bangalore 2006

Some photographs from graduation day at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (Wikipedia), 2006.
I should be posting photos from the rehearsal first, but since I have not yet named and sifted through those photos, here are photos from the convocation evening. This is me, after I had been robed and sashed (is that the correct usage?). Anyway...

Harish Arora with his camcorder, and Vinay Avasthi in appreciative mirth.

I am incorrigible with a camera. These are Prof Jishnu Hazra, chairperson of the PGP program, and Prof Raj Bandi, chairperson of the PGSEM program.

This is the procession as it starts to make its way to the amphitheater.

The high tea. Some snacks, juices, and sweets. Amit Singh was busy with his camera. Shooting me shoot him.

Once the procession started to make its way to the amphitheater, you could see that the chief guest, chairman, and director were there on the dias. While the four chairpersons were standing at the entrance. From left to right, they are the chairpersons of the FPM, PGPPM, PGP, and PGSEM programs.