Recollection of three incidents... one triggering the next :)

(1) - Better change to IT industry sir...

I had to rush to attend a talk. I crossed the road and wave at a couple of auto rickshaws before this auto driver stops. He seemed to know the particular auditorium and I hopped into it. The auto snaked it way through the Bangalore city traffic encountering traffic signals every now and then. In one such long red-signal, the driver started talking to me.

Are you basically from Karnataka sir?
- nopes, not really. I am from Tamil Nadu.
Oh, then you speak better kannada...good.
- actually I have lived here for close to five years.
hmmm, so what do you work on sir?
- well, I am an engineer, working on electronics.
oh, is it. My son also got into Bharat Electronics and will be into software. Why dont you also try to change into IT sir?
- why so?
If you are ten years experienced in SW, you can earn little less than a lakh rupees per month. You cannot be in any other industry
- hmmm yes, you are true, but I like it.
Its not what you like sir, its which work gets you the max money.
- ok sir, I will try.

I get down and pay the fare. Walking back from the auditorium after the talk, I was pondering on what the auto driver was telling couple of hours ago, that I remembered my communicator chat conversations with a freshman @ HCL and he was in fact asking me some difficult questions

(2) Pay, Onsite, Offers...

That I am into this electronics HW field now, what should I learn on?
- Its mostly applying what you have studied in college, you have to go understand the higher perspective on the go...
Oh, fine fine, can you suggest me any books?
- Read the 'High Speed - Black Magic' book. (In fact many of us have kept the book down after reading few pages).
Tell me which field in better - HW, Firmware or software applications?
- In terms of ?
In terms of pay, onsite and of course job opportunities.
- All are good.
You are in this field for six years, how much do you earn?
(I close the communicator chat - In fact my father asked me this only once in all this six years)

(3) Return paths can be anyway,

My hands feel the thick engravings of a fresh one-hundred rupee note. With a ruffling sound, I take the note from my wallet and paid my dinner bill. Smiling at Gandhi back, I was forced to recollect this young man with a smiling face whom I interviewed. It was my first experience of interviewing people for electronics HW job. The whole day, I was meeting people mostly from the power electronics background, a field that I had no hands-on experience. I was literally tired after 3-4 hours of this. Lastly came this resume came and came this guy. He was one year elder to me working in Bangalore for a French company. He was good in explaining the projects. Good.
Then came the time when I saw some specific eda tool in his resume which he claimed he knew. Probing a little in I figured out he has not worked in the tool at all...ok fine, he might have been good in analysing the results. So one final question on high-speed current return path and the reply left me completely aghast. I felt like kicking that guy. Politely I had to reject this candidate.

By first incident, I was surprised by the extent of brainwashing that IT has done to the society. By the second incident, I felt how much our system of education has trained people to focus on money alone. The third incident I felt how much our IT and education system combined has left people totally waste.

We all want to earn a better living and never yearn for one !!!

Litter - they are no good until you reduce their usage!

Plastics... these interlinked molecules have explored places which even normal man would not. We can achieve that inch-by-inch coverage of land as plastics do, but require exhaustive patience. Travelling by rail in India will give you an insight on how plastics has influenced our daily lives. More than that it throws light on the amount of litter we generate due to sheer ignorance.

Intercity train from Bangalore starts early morning and does one round-trip to Coimbatore in a day. Approximately it travels 400 kms, carrying more than 1000 people. This generates say litter of 1000 paper plate equivalent in a day. In the same line we have some more than two dozen trips every day. 24*1000 ~ 25k paper plates. Considering 10cm radius plates, it will take the plates to cover the entire stretch of surface area in three years.

Though paper degrades compared to plastics, it takes years. Also the paper plates have typical coating which again makes it non-degradable. So much of litter, and so much ignorant we are that we might one day be consumed by floods. Poor water, if we do not leave it drain fast into the earth, where will that go?

Reuse, reduce and recycle (we must first discard properly, segregate and then recycle!!!)
This herculean task can be accomplished only by the power of our minds and not just by yet another govt. policy

En kanmani, un kadhali - song with a difference

Songs are a good source of linguistic nuances as well as nuances in thoughts. To say the truth, I learn most of my Tamil from songs.I love this particular song 'En kanmani un kadhali' from Tamil movie of the 70s for its music and the way its sung and of course, the way its portrayed. Thanks to youtube for allowing me to watch and re-watch the song umpteen times that powered me to blog on it.

The song starts with the pair of lovers fixedly gazing each other while travelling in a local town bus. Suddenly an clone of each of them start with the verses (Read it as: two of them in their own world). The song explores on the way the two in their own world interacts with the real world including their own real self. The song is written, sung and directed in such a way that four of them sing the song at few places. I think the individual singer voices were not mixed ( two track: one for the real world, one for the clone)

Here is the link to the youtube video

A project well planned - 10 years ago

I often recollect those days busy preparing for the 12th grade exam,

31Dec '2K, the JEE results, shattered dreams as I entered 2001... I opened the text books, the scent of fresh paper wafting through the air with the taste of tears spreading in my tongue.

One phone call to my aunt, and my aunt arrived at coimbatore...

No consolations were told, we all dropped in for a comedy movie.
Back home,she took 3 days to assess the syllabus and plan the course of study for tackling the public exams. She had infact prepared a 45 day plan for the project. The plan included activities not only for me, but for my mom, sis and papa as well.

My sis quicly learnt cooking, father did all the supervision of the house, so that mom could supervise my study plan.

This was indeed a project well planned, well supervised by my mom and well supported by my sis and papa.

...
...
...

This was ten years ago. I feel the the way time rolls on...inevitable passage of time :)

linked...yet lonely

Endless list of friends, known, once known, just seen, unknown...the list is really endless and thats social networking all about. The sites offer a voyueristic pleasure of intruding into someone else's private life and this keeps them in business.

I think its like the narcotics...once addicted you crave for it, more and more. I met a college kid while travelling to Tiruchirappali. Six hour journey by bus, I killed time mostly by watching this kid's activity. He had a mobile application hooked on to the networking sites and he was into his own customised world. In the mobile-network fringe areas, when the data got disrupted, he got so frustrated and restless in his seat. He was into a virtual world where one need not yearn or earn for pleasure. Once he said he had lots of friends, three hours later he said he was all alone!

Now who is to blame? The social network sites? users? society?

Ten promises to my dog...

Tamil and Japanese make me experience the role of languages in our daily lives. Language intertwines with day to day activities in your life, the way you think, act and respond to external events. In short, they give a new perceptions to life. And as always Japanese movies make my eyes glee with tears at some instant of time. One such was 'Inu to watashi no 10 no yakusoku', meaning the ten promises between me and doggy.

Released in 2008, 'Ten promises to my dog' expresses the bonding between the girl and the dog. The film starts with the Akari, a young woman narrating her childhood with her 'socks'. Her mother names the newly found dog 'socks' since her feet resembles socks. The ten promises are the ones her mother tells Akari. True to her name, Akari is like the unending light that the whole universe looks into. The movie also captures the feelings of the girl as she grows up.

As with most of Japanese movies, patience is the key to finish watching the movie. At one point in time, Akari reminded me of Ritu, my mentor/ex-colleague's daughter and her puppy Randy. Lots of thoughts and memories spooled from their rusted reels...

Promises are not only for dog and you, but for any new relation you might enter into!, what do you say?

Happiness stealer

One forceful wish by an adamant guy...had he not done that, he would have been the wealthiest of all... (A real incident heard it in a different perspective!)

'Happiness stealer'; wishfully received out of God's creations...


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God said "NO, do not ask me to grant your wish!...enjoy your life..."

Our guy, a business magnet could entertain himself with anything he wished, but this wish of his could not be fulfilled by the vastness of his business empire.

After business hours, like a door-door salesman, he filled God's ears with his wish repeatedly.

God had only one answer "NO"

As with any business dealing, next he started threatening God.

God made him get more business so that this guy would not pester any further but in vain...

Business-man was adamant...and finally God fulfilled his wish...a girl child...

That was the day after when he lost all his happiness

As she grew, she stole happiness from people around her...all of them died grief stricken!

Now, even at the rim of life, she still loves stealing happiness from her spouse, son, and recently daughter-in-law, grandchild, huh...everyone.

She is sixty and still going on...

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ROADS....from sandy roads all the way again to sandy roads!!

Man cleared the bushes and paved a path to walk along safely. He evolved and when he invented the wheel and wheel carts, he made the path a little wider; this was circa 4 century BC. Slowly over the course of 2200 years wheels evolved in various facets when it met the engine technology and automobiles were created. This journey still continues and we have got n-lane roads made out of asphalt, concrete and recently plastics!

A step ahead we will be having roads that have photovoltaic underneath them and produce energy out of the sun all the day along. This is still in very pre-mature stage and prototypes are being carried out (http://solarroadways.com/). These roads are expected to have displays that would send our emergency information to the road users. More information on their construction is shared in their web-site.

Imagine such roads with loads of silicon circuitry underneath them...all sending out signals with a programmed purpose.

A system churning out engineers (a.k.a cheap labour)

Recently exposed bogus mark-sheet scandal in Tamil Nadu reinforces the point that our systems, processes and our mindset are not geared up to meet ethical standards, leave alone global competitive standards. This scandal has indeed exposed the greediness in us; the greediness for power that exists in all layers of a society.

Being an engineer thirty years ago was regarded something special and engineers were held in high respect then. But these days, an engineering degree is more common that every second person you meet from a middle-class and upward family is an engineer. Five years ago Tamil Nadu (TN) had 230 engineering colleges...almost half of what we have now. TN government abolishing the common entrance exam four years ago has forced students to vie even for 0.01 marks. For every decimated fraction of marks approaching the 100%, you have thousands of students competing. This is the case almost in any state though in varying proportions.

Though the rise of IT in India cannot be blamed fully for this situation, it has a equal role to play. As cheap goods from China are not the goods sought out for, engineers from India will soon become a chunk of cheap labour that the world will not seek out for...both of them will be used in day-to-day life and will be dumped in the back-yard...

Learn it in your native tongue... in your own way !!

Four years from now we will see engineers with more concrete basics who had opted for studying in Tamil medium. Had there been no Tamil in the engineering entrance question paper side-by-side to English, I swear I would have score 2-3 marks less. Reading it in my native tongue increased my comprehending speed and avoided any ambiguous situation. I had then dreamed of studying engineering in Tamil, and now it is a reality. Yes, from this year onwards selected colleges will offer Civil and Mechanical streams in Tamil.

Some might argue that Tamil-engineers cannot cope up with the current industry which is services based. But at the end of the day what matters is how much of an engineer you are rather than how much of a communicator you express. It all depends on what people consider as success...Being an engineer or being a fluent English speaker. We can study the degree in Tamil and still learn to communicate in English, but not the other way round. When the whole world is embracing web2.0, Let's embrace this next step with pride.