wolframalpha

www.wolframalpha.com

Worth visiting once. It got me addicted! It's quite fun.
However, I couldn't figure out anything useful to ask it.

Of them. Of me. And of time so inadequate.

Slow down! Slow Down!
They all tell me.
You have time. Loads of time.
They all tell me.
How do they know?
I have to ask.
Do I have a lakh of days
or just enough for a prayer?
How do they know?
Do they have enough?
Whether ten or a thousand?
How do they know?

I look at them,
by the road side,
sleeping on their mats
in the heat with no taps.
I swallow a tear
too embarrassed every time
as I pass on by in my ac car
knowing my time will come
in five years or so
when I can help their kind
and change their world
as much as I can

Now I wait
As I have waited since I was eight
The time is close now
Dream, I can now
Plan, I should not
lest it takes from the path.

Time is short and the wait is long
Only by finishing my first can I go to the next
Will it run out if I run faster?

Let the world be green

V's gift to me: Sony Reader!
(And yes, it does read like paper)

Voted!

If you aim for the sky,

reaching a mountain top will feel inadequate.

Registered voters demographics

Here is a graph of voters distributed by age. Randomly selected 25K registered voters in Bangalore.


No wonder internet has suddenly become a huge marketing arena for all parties.

8.5 Years

Happy anniversary to us!

Dealing With Corruption

There are many forms of corruption in our country. V and I once complained about a government car not being towed/moved from a no-parking area. The DCP who took our complaint was pretty diligent about it but tried to convince us that this was not corruption but misuse of power.

To me, misuse of power is just a form of corruption. However, most of our country thinks of corruption as only bribery. So, this is what I will try to address.

Bribery happens in a very very rampant way. Only very few government employees out rightly refuse an money. We should simply legalize this.

If a government employee who initiates a project will get some commission( even .2-.5%) from whoever wins the contract, they will go ahead without any prejudice. Of course, problems will arise if they take bribes on top of this commission structure.

The advantage will be great though- we the taxpayers will be making money through the taxes that are imposed on these bribes- our GDP will be much higher if our parallel economy is merged to a certain extent with the real one.

Another problem would be that bribes would be given within organizations by these employees to get to these coveted, money making jobs. Another one would be that our politicians like to impose an image of a poor person- they would not want anyone to know how much money they are making.

Theoretically, the idea was decent though.

Stupid Little Girl

Working in India as a woman is bad- really bad. It has open condescension, open hostility and open sexual exploitation.

"Stupid little girl"- is what my friend, who is a MD of a company got hear from the IT guys. According to them, she was just a stupid little girl who didn't know how to run a business and thus should pay them a bribe/pay an incredibly high and incorrectly applied fine. Too bad for them, it is just that statement which is landing them in trouble.

But fighting back openly is fine when you don't want to do business with the other company. What does one do if it is the client who does this? When you are asked "where is your husband/father"? When you go to a client who has 1500 employees and you only meet one woman in your 4 day stay? When a reseller taking you out for dinner isn't able to tell his wife that you are a woman? When a client calls you over to his hotel room for a meeting and calls you gorgeous?

This is from the women business owners' perspective- of which there aren't many. This open hostility is comparatively non existent for MNC employees- but the salary discrepancy is still appalling.

I am not a feminist and never wanted to be one. Same is true for a lot of my other women friends. But if that is what it takes to maintain our lifestyle, then that is what has to be done.

Random-ness? Predicting the future

If I roll a dice, I have equal chances of getting a '6' or a '4'. However, if I have rolled a '6' once, then my second roll has lower chances of getting a '6'.

This is 'cause probability of getting two sixes in a row are low. However, both my rolls were independent rolls. Independently, I should have equal chances of a '6' both times. Then why does this happen?

Also, if 6 different people were to roll six different dice at the same time, theoretically we should get each of the numbers. But that isn't so in reality. Why?

Also, if V were to roll a six and then I were to roll, m probability of a 6 is low.

Can we predict the dice roll on the basis of previous rolls?

Now, let's make it simpler and take a coin; say I will be tossing the coin 3 times and I will have to predict the third toss result. First toss is 50-50 chance and I get a head. Second time , I get a head again. My prediction would then be a tail for the third one. BUT, what if I get a head and then a tail? What should my third guess be then? I would say head because the probability of two tails in a row is low. (But then again, head-tail-head should also be low. )

If I were to know what everyone on earth rolled till date and the number of times a number has been rolled, should I be able to predict the next number?


Going back to the original predict the future question, I don't think we can predict our own future just on probability alone. Example: pick a number between 1-20. Apparently, the most common human-generated-one is this.

Our Obsession with the West

It is interesting to watch meetings of the intellectuals of our society. It will rebuff any theories of well they understand our society. The most recent one I attended had unending discussions of, guess what- Sarah Palin and other intricacies of the American election. If I were to ask them about the upcoming Assembly elections and its implications on the country’s future policies, they would fall short.

We seem to be a society taking up problems which are easy to solve and in fact, do not require our direct involvement. We are happy pointing fingers and solving all levels of issues, sitting in our embroidery-covered sofas for problems that are half a world away from us!

So few of us stand up and take up the issues that surround us that it is appalling. Every week I meet people who complain about the trees in Bangalore being cut down- but we don’t see any effectual protest being done beyond living room cribbing. The most shocking of people who follow anything the government throws at them is that of the ‘Pub City of India’; Bangalore has become such a boring city that dessert places also try closing down by 10pm for lack of customers (Corner House being an exception).

The loss of business due to the 11:30pm deadline, by my uninformed guess, would be in the range of Rs 500 cr per month. There is a definite loss of young people (which might be overshadowed by the inflow of small town kids flowing in) who prefer Delhi or Mumbai where at least they can spend a bit of their easy-earned money. I am not even counting this block on the economy- the slowed growth due to less flowing money.
The point however remains that the city which prided itself as the pub city of India is now a dead city. And no one raised an eyebrow. This city, the home of Kingfisher breweries produces sales at just a bit better than a nearby small town. And not even the king of Kingfisher pushed his political clout.

This indifference or the lack of guts to stand up what our rights makes me wonder how we ever even got our independence. It does explain a few things though- like how most of the leaders of our freedom fight were educated outside of India. Even Ambedkar, now the symbol for political usage by a party catering to the most uneducated and downtrodden of our people, spent multiple years getting educated in the west.
This indifference and the ability to merge whatever is thrown at us is a good thing too; in a country of such vastly different vested communities, where states are divided by the language people speak, where there are streets of people of only one community, we still manage to be tolerant to our neighbours, we still have relatively negligible community clashes to how many should have been. We are still one country. 17 national languages. And we are still one country. We don’t inter-marry. But we are still one country.

But coming back to the original point, we prefer solving other people’s problems because on one hand the issues are too big for us to do something and on the other hand we have a sab-chalta-hai and a swalpa-adjust-madi philosophy on life. A philosophy, that has saved our skin and also been our downfall.

On the personal front, I would just like a few intelligent people to be able to talk to about my own damn country.

A consequency of the BPO economy...

...laymen judge company value by the number of employees.

Do you?

I know my life's work; do you?

Subprime for dummies

Naresh forwarded this a while back. In light of the current state of things, I thought I should share it:
(I don't know who the original author is)