Girish's Blog

The Outer Ring Road in Bangalore is probably not as well known for cricket as the Eden Gardens, Lords or the Sydney Cricket Ground, but last Sunday I was watching a game of cricket on a Sunday morning in one of the few patches of land left on the Outer Ring Road in Bangalore. The kids are surrounded by multi story buildings under construction, land-moving equipment and granite slabs, but nothing beats the joy of playing cricket in the morning. The lay of the land: the pitch looks bouncy and it might aid bowlers in the morning. The batsman watches the ball go over the slip cordon Once in a while the ball gets lost amidst the concrete slabs behind the wickets and the wicketkeeper has to point the location out to the fielder at first slip. An intensive search proceeds. Retrieval efforts fail and the wicket keeper himself proceeds to find the ball. When a new batsman comes, the bails are set properly and the game proceeds. I expect the next time I'm back here, the construction equipmen...

I'll be brief: short stories in 6 words or less . Some of them: For sale: baby shoes, never worn - Ernest Hemingway TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! … nobody there … - Harry Harrison Tick tock tick tock tick tick. - Neal Stephenson

Data need not be dry as dust. Hans Rosling's amazing presentation at TED will change your mind regarding how data can be presented and about the growth of the world economy. If you thought this was amazing, see the followup (all the way till the ending). The seemingly impossible is possible !

I've just spent a week in Bangalore talking and hearing about connectivity for emerging countries. Living in the United States, one takes many things for granted - water, power, transportation and most importantly connectivity which has become an essential utility. Most emerging countries lack the capability or the will to deliver water, power and transportation to their citizens. However, a large number of organizations are coming up with innovative low-cost solutions to provide connectivity in the hope that this digital inclusion will mitigate the effects of lacking the other three utilities. There have been a number of stories in the local press about Tata Communications launching the world's largest WiMAX network (another company in the group recently launched the world's cheapest car). Inspite of the hype, the state of connectivity is abysmal - there are only 2.9 million broadband connections: a penetration rate of almost 0.25 % However, hidden behind all this brou...

NASA has released some interesting material on the composition of the Universe - as it is today and as it was 13.7 billion years ago, 1 second after the Big Bang. Dark Matter , which forms 23% of the Universe, is different from atoms and does not emit or absorb light. It has only been detected indirectly by its gravity. The bulk of the universe, 72%, is composed of " Dark Energy ", that acts as a sort of an anti-gravity. This energy, distinct from dark matter, is responsible for the present-day acceleration of the universal expansion. Atoms, the building blocks we are made of, comprise of just 4.6% of the Universe. It's amazing that atoms are so scarce in the Universe and even more amazing how irreverently we treat our Earth and fellow-beings.

Dr.Srikumar Rao's book Are You Ready To Succeed ? is one of the most unusual books I have read in 2007. I read it on a flight from Bangalore to San Francisco and as soon as I finished the reading it, I went back and started reading it again. The book is sub-titled "An unconventional guide to personal transformation in work & in life" and it is written in a very direct engaging manner as though Dr.Rao is directly talking to you. This writing style probably emerges from the fact that the book arose from a very successful course conducted by Dr.Rao at Columbia Business School. As the author states repeatedly in the book, to derive the most benefit out of the book, you have to be committed to doing the exercises in the book. These exercises force you to take a very candid look at your mental models - the lens by which you perceive the universe and your relationship to it. Blaise Pascal wrote, " All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet roo...

One of my favorite bloggers, Atanu Dey, writes on how to write and has a simple prescription: Good writing is the product of some very hard thinking. Lazy thinkers cannot be good writers. Know a bit, know that you know it, know logic, read great writers, do some hard thinking, learn vocabulary, and practice writing. Repeat until desired results are obtained.

The Outer Ring Road in Bangalore hosts a who's-who from Silicon Valley: Cisco Systems, Intel, AOL, Accenture, Intuit, Motorola. Among the other inhabitants of the IT corridor: The SMA Pork Stall has a vantage position. And of course, the inevitable gridlocks where nobody wants to yield the right of way.

The Indian Express reports : A volatile atmosphere prevailed in the Assembly on Friday with members of the ruling party, including a couple of Ministers, and those of the AIADMK almost coming to blows. During the discussion, PWD Minister Durai Murugan, addressed Jayalalithaa in singular person. The problem started when Jayalalithaa said Anbazhagan was just an assistant professor in Pachaiyappa’s College. From the treasury benches, too, members as well as Ministers rushed to the well and members of both parties started shouting at each other near the Speaker’s podium. After the House resumed business, Jayalalithaa said the DMK Government had lost moral rights to continue in office and led her partymen in a walk-out. Our taxes help our honorable legislators receive salary travel allowances medical reimbursement telephone allowances pensions furnishing of private residences and amenities Not too bad for a job for which the only qualification is age and the intention to redistribute publi...

The Reserve Bank of India has launched a comic book series to explain monetary policy to the public. It shows the secret control room that the RBI maintains and the levers (literally - there's a lever called Interest Rate !) they employ to control the economy. Read and enjoy ! There's more financial education from RBI on their website .

AOL announced that it will stop supporting Netscape from Feb 1. In almost a decade the company grew to symbolize the Internet boom, it's IPO the start gun for the dot-com boom, it went through the M&A process which symbolized the excessive valuations, had an epic battle with Microsoft(which realized the power of Free! No purchase necessary) , it lost market share, became obsolete and now it's dead. It seems to have gone through in a decade what most companies go through in about 50 years. I still recall the very first time I used an Internet browser - in 1995 when my then employer, Tata-IBM, installed a common machine on the 7th floor with Internet access and offered eligible employees an opportunity to use it. I got an approval from my manager and launched Netscape. Until then I had e-mail which all the cubicle dwellers on my floor accessed on a DEC VAX machine and a link to IISc that went down every couple of days and stayed down for a few days. I then heard about ...

It takes a great deal of introspection and courage to state what you believe in 500 words or less, especially in a public forum like NPR . What are your core beliefs and values that define you, that you would never compromise on? NPR has many essays from celebrities as well as others on " This I Believe " Worth spending a few hours reading.

Some self-analysis for a change .... What drives you as an individual to make specific choices and how do you act on them ? Adam Smith, in The Wealth Of Nations, claims that it is the "invisible hand" that motivates individual behavior and when each person acts in his own self-interest, it benefits the society as a whole. " It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages ." This has been used by many economists as the foundation of the free-market theory - the market is self-regulating. However, when individuals act in their self-interest, how do we know if it is their short-term or long-term self-interest ? How does it benefit the society in the short-term and the long-term ? The Katha Upanishad talks about two kinds of actions:...

The Hindu has the story of how the Government of India issued Letters of Intent for telecom operators: ... representatives of wannabe telecom companies literally got into fist fights and blows in a bid to be the first to get the letter of intent. At 2:45 PM The DoT announces that Letters of Intent will be issued at 3:30 PM ...a representative of one of the applicants got a hired goon to ensure that it was his company which was the first to enter the gates. Finally LIs were issued to nine companies. Real estate giant Unitech got LIs for 22 circles, Datacom for 22, BPL and Shyam got 21 LIs, Idea for 9 circles, STel got 6, Spice got only 4 though it had applied for pan India, Swan got 13 and Tata Teleservices got LIs for offering CDMA services in 3 circles. If all the companies convert the LIs to licences by paying the entry fee, the Government will stand to get in excess of Rs 7,000 crore.