New Delhi Times

Nine months after we organized the very first one in India, Barcamp comes back to Delhi on December 9th! The last Barcamp caused a mini-revolution of sorts and since then we have had Barcamps in all the major cities of India. BarcampDelhi-2 efforts have been led by Navjot from Opera. The theme is going to be around web standards though as is typical of Barcamps – anything related to technology is fair game! Marc Canter who is visiting us right now will also attend. Marc is a great speaker and its worth making the trip to Noida if only to hear him speak!

All details available at the wiki. See you there!

My buddy Vishesh’s blog post finally got me to write my own thoughts on this issue of life. When I had first read the “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“, I had not realized the profoundness behind the rather amusing conlusion in the book that the answer to the question of life, universe and everything else is “42″. The answer seems funnily absurd and in its own brilliant way shows how futile it is to try and explain life.

Religions were created precisely for the purpose of explaining life. Why things happen the way they do is often linked to ones “Karma”. So if you do bad things, then bad things will happen to you and vice versa. While, this is a convenient explanation that everybody likes to believe, the fact is that real life is rarely like that. Obviously bad deeds go unpunished. At the same time, nasty things happen to good people. So while I am a believer, I do not think religion can satisfactorily explain life.

So how does one explain life? Perhaps, the most logical explanation is to think of life as a sequence of unconnected random events. The moment we try to link cause-effect relationship to events in our life, we fail to understand life. If one can truly believe that life is just a bunch of random things happening for no specific reason, you can stop struggling with this question. If you can really think that good things are not a consequence of good deeds and bad things dont happen because of bad deeds, you can stop asking the “why me?” question. Why you? Because it had to happen to some random being – it just happened to be you. If you really follow this philosophy, then you would do your good deeds never expecting anything in return. Similarly, you will not hold yourself accountable for an occasional little sin you might commit. Its truly like “living in the moment”. The past doesn’t affect the present and the present will not affect the future.

While I may profess the above, I definitely do not follow that. Why? Because its damn hard to follow that philosophy! The human mind tries to rationalize everything. But if you can, then give this approach to life a try. If it really works, then maybe they can religion after me or something……

Interesting match. Please dont call me a sexist but a female cricket commentator just doesn’t cut it for me. Sorry. It just doesn’t sound right.

Every morning we get a “Thought for the day” in our inbox from our HR/admin team. I especially loved today’s thought.

“If you want something
you never had,

do something that you
have never done.

Don’t go the way life
takes you.

Take the life the way
you go.

And remember you are
born to live and

not living because you are
born.”

Paolo caught me looking all serious and stuff at Marc’s open house.

People Aggregator is almost done! Almost! Actually no software ever really gets fully done, it perpetually remains in almost done stage. But we are really close now!

He says its cool.

If you are in Delhi (or willing to move here) then Tekriti is clearly the only startup you should consider joining But if you are in Bangalore (and unwilling to move up north!), then Minglebox, a startup founded by my seniors from IIT-Delhi is looking to build its core technology team. The management team is top notch and they are working in the web 2.0 consumer internet space. Kavita forwarded a brief company profile to me:

Company Profile
Minglebox Communications Private Ltd. is a start up in the internet
and mobile space, founded by ex IIT/IIM alumni. 
The founders are marketing and technology professionals with varied
experience in consumer goods, internet, telecom, financial services and IT
industries across India and
the US.
 The company aims to build internet and mobile
consumer products for the next generation of Indian users.  This is located in Bangalore.

Minglebox is in the process of setting up a world class technology
team to build a set of highly scaleable web 2.0 based
applications/platforms.   

Founder Profiles

Kavita Iyer – is
the Chief Executive Officer of Minglebox and has over 10 years experience
across business and marketing roles in India’s leading corporates – the
Tata Group, ICICI and till recently Wipro Technologies’ financial services
business.  She is a director’s gold
medallist from IIT Delhi and an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus.

Sanjay Aggarwal – is the Chief Technology Officer
of the company and has over 12 years of experience in the software/IT industry.
He has extensive experience in building enterprise, carrier grade and internet
products.  He was a key member of an
early stage telecom startup in Boston
where he helped build a highly scalable web based Network Management solution. He
has worked for many global services/products/technology companies including Yahoo,
Infosys, Nortel and Cascade/Lucent.  Sanjay
holds a Bachelors degree from IIT Delhi.

Sushma Abburi – is
the Chief Product Officer of the company and has over 10 years of experience in
product management and IT consulting with leading corporates in the US and
India.  She started her career with
Hindustan Lever and till recently headed global support for a range of supply
chain products with i2 Technologies.  She
has an MS from Georgia Tech, Atlanta
and a Bachelors degree from IIT Delhi.

Contact

You can reach Kavita at kavita.iyer@minglebox.com

Remote blogging is yet another geek proprogated term which makes little sense to most humans. It simply means that if you have multiple blogs (say one on blogspot, another on wordpress.com etc) then you can write a post once and send it to all your blogs with in a single click.
Remote blogging is not for everybody. But many bloggers routinely maintain multiple blogs and want to be able to “cross post” across blogs. So for those folks People Aggregator should come as a welcome relief!

So what’s new?