June 2005 Archives

I got many thought provoking comments to my recent post on how engineering is such a hot profession in India. I agree with the general sentiment that ignorance and herd mentality are the main reasons for students blindly following a well travelled path. Apart from this, the social seterotypes are so rigid that it is almost expected that a student who is doing well in school will take a crack at IIT or medical entrance exams. Jatin pointed out that almost 200,000 students appeared for the MBA entrance exams as well. However, it is well known that over half of them are engineers. That is just more evidence that a majority of engineers actually get forced into the profession. Why else would they jump to management without even gaining any professional experience?

The good news is that in today's India, there are several other career options. We have 100s of TV channels in India. So there has to be lot of scope of in the media industry. We publish the world's most read newspaper Journalism ought to be hot. The retail sector is growing very fast. There was an interesting article in India Today about art restoration and how expensive it is. So that is another niche avenue. And don't forget Bollywood. Its a billion dollar industry employing millions of people. Surely there is money to be made there!

It is wrong to say that students opt for medicine or engineering because of a dearth of options. However, parents and schools alike need to take responsibility of introducing students to all the possible choices out there. Unless we encourage this out of the box thinking, we can not expect innovation and enterprise from our coming generations.

Microsoft is going to provide a software called Atlas which will make building AJAX enabled web apps easier.

Today's newspaper had an article about the booming IIT coaching industry in Kota, a small town in Rajasthan. The IIT entrace exam results were declared recently and that was as big a news item as the Left's opposition to the privatization of BHEL. And not without reason. Every year, over 30,000 aspirants move to Kota lock, stock and barrel to spend two years preparing for the IIT entrance exam. The coaching institutes apparently have tie-ups with local schools which take it easy on these kids. Having to go to school is actually considered a distraction! Similar coaching centers exist in all big cities of India as well. But for some reason, Kota has become like the mecca of IIT coaching and the number of pilgrims is increasing every year!

Almost 200,000 students sit for the actual exam and only 5000 get selected. It is interesting to note that 5000 undergraduate seats is a fairly large number for any educational institution (even if it is spread over 6 locations). So IITs are not so exclusive by choice. But in a country of 1 Billion, even the most abundant of resources can appear to be scarce.

Even though I am an IIT-ian myself, I feel sad that so much empahsis should be laid on an engineering degree in our country. Engineering is a very traditional profession. Even considered boring in the West. The mad rush to get into IITs is a reflection of our society's emphasis on taking the conservative, tried and tested path. If all the best and the brightest kids will become engineers, who will take the country forward in the fields of medicine, science, literature, and arts?

The high regard for engineers in India can perhaps be traced back to the time of independence when nation building required lots of local engineering talent. Pandit Nehru was known to be unhappy about the fact that India had to import foreign technology and hence he had commissioned the creation of the IITs. While Nehru's dream has come true (at least partially), a side effect has been the creation of a society with highly skewed and prejudiced view towards all other professions.

I finally found a couple of hours to tackle the spam issue that has been plaguing my blog for a while now. I have hacked up the Movable Type scripts such that now when you go to post a comment, you need to type in the word 'nospam' in a textbox before hitting submit. If the field is left empty or an incorrect word is typed in, the comment is blocked. This is obviously "security by obscurity" but I believe this is what works best against spammers. It is highly unlikely that any spammer will spend the extra time to customise his/her scripts to workaround a home grown solution like mine.

Hopefully that should solve the comment spam problem once and for all!

I ended up deleting over 9500 comments from my blog today. I am getting over 500 comments everyday. At this rate I will run out of disk space and bandwidth very soon. Unfortunately I cant find any good solution to tackle comments spam on MovableType running on IIS. And I just haven't had a chance to create something myself. Today my blog's page rank is showing up as 3 (down two points!). If it has really gone down, its probably because all the outward links to spam sites on my blog. That is the last straw. Need to something on the weekend to tackle this problem!

Ashish and Nazim blog about our recent Bowling event. I sucked that day. I swear those lanes were rigged ;-)

Tantek Celik announced microformats.org at Supernova 2005. Marc is also there talking about reblgging (the misspelling is intentional!) - something that we have been closely involved with. I spent the last couple of weeks learning all about microformats and microcontent (and the differences between the two). I will leave it to Marc to talk more about it but needless to say I am super excited! The semantic web is becoming a reality fast!

Last Monday I got a speeding ticket. This morning my car broke down (smoke coming out the car a/c ...). I spent over 3 hours in the heat, not to mention the additional expenses. I don't know what Mondays have gotten against me but they sure are making my life hard. Isn't there a way to jump directly to Tuesday from Sunday?

Recently, Rajesh Jain took a trip down the memory lane and recounted his IndiaWorld days on his blog (Rajesh sold IndiaWorld to Satyam for over $100 million). The dot com era was a thrilling time and I had my own little adventures then. I was in 2nd year at IIT when my buddy Himanshu and myself decided to start our first dotcom. A couple of hours of discussion was enough for us to zero down on creating a classifieds website. Mind you - this was 1998 and there were no India specific classifieds website online (I would say classifieds are still not done right even today here - there is no equivalent of craigslist in India). So we set out to create BharatClassifieds. A couple of days of hacking perl scripts later, we had our website ready for release. Yes - we took an idea to its implementation in less than a week. Of course it wasn't earth shattering but we were very proud of it. Once BharatClassifieds (codenamed BhaCla by us) was ready, we needed content so that the site wouldn't look empty. So, we decided to manually type in a few dozen ads in each category from the newspapers. We also made up some ads. It was kind of fun to put in a matrimonial for a class mate or put somebody's car for sale without telling them. The next step was more challenging. To make the site work, we had to get people to put in their ads themselves. We needed to do some marketing! It turned out that in those days, VSNL (local monopolistic ISP of that time) left its subscriber list lying around on its server for anybody to use. Thus started our mass email marketing campaign. And while today it will be labelled as spam - back then people used to email us back to thank us for starting a free website which was so useful! Sounds unbelievable huh?

The site was ready, emails had been sent, and fake content had been typed in. Now we had to wait for first real ad to show up. It didn't take long. An erotic massage parlor in Thailand decided that BhaCla was a great place for them to advertise their services. So they had the honor of posting the first real add on BhaCla! Soon it became an addiction for me to check the statistics for the website. Within a few weeks, we had started getting several dozen ads per day. Sometimes I would ask my friends and family to just respond to an ad and mention that they had come across it on BhaCla. You know, to give an impression to the users that the system actually worked.

A few months onwards we were getting a steady stream of traffic. Not a whole lot but I think it was in the range of some tens of thousands of hits per month. In 1999, for a website that never spent a money on advertising or development, it wasn't bad at all. Soon we created GreetingsIndia, an India specific website for greeting cards and IndianJobShop, a website for jobs. It was at the same time when Naukri.com was brand new and just starting to gain popularity. So without realizing it, we had covered quite few bases of what can be called a "portal". But a few months later we lost focus. We got busy with college. We heard of millions of dollars pouring in as VC money in other websites and got disheartened.

In the final year of IIT, Himanshu and I made a comeback. We participated with full gusto in a business plan competition organized by IIT Bombay. We had some ideas around Bluetooth applications for the consumer market. We worked real hard on it and made it to the last 10 amongst over 150 entries. However the final round was a real anti-climax for us when the VC judges shot down our idea after looking at just the first slide of our presentation. What a disappointment it had been! Incidentally Rajesh Jain was on the panel that day.

When I look back, I think we had a real good thing going with BhaCla and we never realized it. We had noticed early on that matrimonials were the single most popular section and even discussed starting a dedicated site for matrimonials. But we never did. With the job site, I used to get calls from recruiters across the country who wanted to get a 'homepage' on my site (I had this concept where any HR firm could get a free homepage on the website if they posted enough ads there). But I never took it to the next level. The bluetooth idea was not worth anything and I am thankful to those VCs for shooting it down mercilessly. But in the process of making this business plan, I came in contact with Dr. Jhunjhunwala who has since been like a mentor for me. So I gained a lot even though it had seemed like a total failure at that point of time.

So that was my little dot com era story. Not quite as successful or enlightening as Rajesh's, but nonetheless very memorable for me.

PS: I googled and turns out BhaCla is still listed in many online directories. And if you want to see what the site used to look like check out the archived version on the Wayback machine

CNET has an interesting story about Ourmedia

"Ourmedia's ultimate goal is not to amass a huge collection of video, but to establish open standards that will make vast multimedia libraries and archives across the Internet accessible through any number of social networks, blog tools, portals and media-sharing sites"

We are approaching 9000 uploads on Ourmedia. The project has come a long way in the last few months. Its still in alpha release but things are much more stable now. We are on the verge of introducing instantaenous uploads which means that vidoes will be published on the Archive as soon you upload them. Sheer coolness!

they: tring tring
me: Tekriti Software
they (obviously ignoring what I said): haan ye mere account ka balance batayege (Can you please check the balance on my account?)
me: This is not a bank
they (still ingoring what I said): accha Raj hai? (Can I talk to Raj?)
me: There is no Raj here
they: (oblivious of my existence): Raj ko bula dijiye (please call Raj)
me: There is no Raj here
they: (clearly not getting it): bhaisahab aapki problem kya hai? please rajan ko bula dijiye (Bro what is your problem? Just call Raj!)
me: I said there is no Rajan here!
they: Isn't this Citi bank?
me: (shouting) NO! It is not Citi bank!
they: to pehle kyo nahi bola *click* (So why didn't you tell me before!)

This is what I go through several times a day. It looks like our office numbers are very similar to those of Citi bank. On most days we get far more calls for Citi bank than for Tekriti Software. I think Citi bank should be paying us. We are virtually running a call center for them ;-)

First I woke up late. Looked out and saw it is one dusty gloomy day. Its like somebody poured the whole of Thar desert over Delhi. Then I forgot my glasses at home and had to go back to get them. THEN I got a speeding ticket for going at a zippy 38 mph. Of course there are no signs on the roads indicating the speed limits. The cops told me everybody is just supposed to know that the speed limit is 30 mph on all the Delhi roads. 30 mph! No wonder Indians are always late.

What a great start to the week. I love Mondays!

Looks like this book tagging thing is spreading. Since I got tagged twice (JD - My name is GAURAV NOT GAUTAM! :)), I wont be a lazy bum and respond.

Total books I own: I think all in all I own over 200 books. But these include my Hardy Boys and Enid Blytons from school days (yes I am one of those guys who never throws anything away!). If I count only those books that I have bought in the last couple of years, I guess I have around 40-50 books.

Last book I bought : The last book I bought was "First break all the rules". I had heard a lot about this book and the title seemed interesting enough.

Last book I read : "Essential Gandhi" edited by Louis Fischer.

Five books that mean a lot to me :

1. Alchemist by Paulo Coelho: Great inspiration for anybody trying to find their calling in life.

2. Golden Gate by Vikram Seth: Pure literary genius. Its a joy to read this book not just for the story it tells but also for the way it tells it (its one long poem).

3. Dilbert's Principle by Scott Adams: So funny! So true!

4. Essential Gandhi: I think this is one of the rare books that can really influence your life. There are teachings in this book which are relevant to both your personal and professional life. Reading this book is almost like having a conversation with Mahatma Gandhi. Highly recommended!

5. MAD comic books: I know these don't qualify as books but MADs have defined my sense of humor over the years (dry and sarcastic). ALFRED E. NEUMAN is my childhood hero :)

A book that’s on its way out of your house as you write this: Like I said before, I never throw anything away. But I think any book I have held on to for more than 10 years has to go now. I am out of space and can not buy any more books because there is no space to keep them!

This one is a classic example of "It happens only in India" syndrome. Today's Hindustan Times carried a report today that a survey was conducted in a town in Bihar to collect data about people living below the poverty line. When the results were turned it, officials noted that most names on the list sounded familiar. Aishwarya Rai, Mallika Sherawat and other Bollywood biggies featured on the "poverty" list. It turned out that the task of conducting the survey was assigned to the government school teachers, who in turn promptly ordered their students to do the ground work. Students, being students and that too in Bihar, decided it was too hot to venture outside. So they cooked up a list of names. Obviously they were not very creative or original. Or maybe they just were having fun. Or maybe there really are poor women named Aishwarya Rai and Mallika Sherawat who live in that small town. With Bihar, you can never be sure :)

A much needed downpour brought the temperatures down a little today. Day temperature was hovering aroud 44 C (111 F) for the last few days. Summers in Delhi are about as pleasant an experience as getting your appendix removed without anesthesia. It gets so hot during the day that you can see mirages on the roads. Nights aren't much better. April-June is the peak summer season in Delhi. So if you are planning to visit, please don't. Wait a few months. Let the monsoons arrive in July. Then it wont be that hot. Only humid. ;-)

MoneyCentral reports that Microsoft has made available a low cost stripped down Hindi version of Windows.

I can say pretty confidently that this effort, while valiant, has very little chance of success. Why? Because while this is a cheaper version, its still not free - unlike the pirated Windows. Morover it is stripped down - nobody wants a stripped down legal version when a full featured pirated version is available for a much lower cost. This 'Starter' edition will find favor with computer vendors though since it helps them bring down the cost of PCs. I bet the resellers will tell their customers that they can always get the full featured Windows XP once they purchase the system *wink* *wink*

Tomorrow, we have a conference call spanning 5 time zones Hawaii, SFO, London, Delhi and New Zeland! Just figuring out a time that suits everybody is a hard task. The world clock comes in handy. It has truly become a small world!

Photos of people crying while eating

Don't ask....

"It happens only in India" is a phrase often used in a lighter vein to describe pecularities that our unique to us. I came across one of those while reading the news paper the other day. The infamous Bofors scandal died its slow death this week with the court squashing all cases and acquitting all the accused, except one. Bofors scandal had revolved around payment of kickbacks for sale of defense equipment to the Indian government in the mid 80s.

According to the judge who was presiding over this case, the investigating agencies spent an astounding Rs 250 crores (roughly $60 million) on this case. Considering the fact that the initial scam was worth a "mere" $12 million dollars, I can understand the judge's frustration and reluctance to continue further investigations. It is beyond comprehension how such a huge amount of public money got squandered without raising any suspicions. I wonder if the investigation was a scam even bigger than the original Bofors scandal!

Like they say, it happens only in India!