Author: SK

so the aptly named “oversight committee” is out with it’s report. as expected, it calls for phased reservation. and as expected, there is no mention of the “creamy layer”.

there has been no hue and cry yet about the creamy layer, but there might be. however, implementing it is virtually impossible. for a start, a “creamy layer” clause may prevent descendents of beneficiaries from availing reservation – which I believe makes a lot of sense.

However, considering that a number of votaries are beneficiaries of reservations themselves, they wouldn’t want their kids (grandkids rather, these buggers are so old) to “suffer” from their own decision. it would be akin to snatching a sweet away from your kid’s hand – something none of these “leaders” will do. and considering the large proportion of “backwards”, it is impossible for the “creamy layer” thing to go through. Sad but true.

On a different note, I have decided it’s time to do something about my waistline, and I’m starting by targeting the creamy layer. curd rice is an essential part of my diet, and nowadays, i’m removing the creamy layer from the top of the vessel which holds the curd and consuming the less fatty and tastier underlying curd. think it has started working! and if a separate “creamy layer policy” can work for my waistline, there is no way it won’t work for the country!

Radio Indigo has succeeded in rocking Bangalore so far. Excellent music. Excellent RJs. No ads. Even since this started, I have been more than happy to hand over control of our Worldspace to my parents (who listen to Sai Global Harmony and Art of Living channels). How long the fun will last is the question.

Right now the channel is not making any money. Just spending loads on music, infra and top-notch RJs. Soon there should be ads. How much will depend on listenership of the channel. And that depends on the market in Bangalore for international music. There have been instances before in India (Go FM in Bombay) where international music channels have gone belly up. And the lack of a sufficient ?network effect? might spell bad news for people like me who prefer this anyday to Himesbhai or Sonu Nigam.

I?m not sure how much this channel can make by way of ads. In this regard, I propose a CAS (conditional access scheme) for radio. The great failing of Worldspace is that it can?t be installed on cars (the antenna has to be stationary).

Could we have encrypted terrestrial FM channels which could be received in cars and homes through a special receiver? Is there a significant technological barrier to that? Of course, a huge problem will be that new instruments for receiving will have to be installed in cars (most of them have ?ordinary? stereos already). Maybe we could have a special antenna that could be added on to existing systems.

Avid listeners of certain genres won?t mind paying a nominal fee to listen to the music of their choice. Channels need not rely on ads anymore, and will instead air more meaningful content. There will be scope for ?niche? channels (one big problem with FM in India today is that all channels play the same Himesbhai or Bluffmaster), and will provide more choice to listeners. Customer profiling can be done and the few ads that are aired can be better targeted and charged a premium. A win-win-win situation for all.

One challenge would be technology. The other is that it would require a major shift in attitude. Apart from Worldspace, people have never been used to paying for radio, so it will take some effort in that direction. Still worth a try, I believe.

On a related note, ?contests? on radio serve a dual purpose. Firstly, channels get a cut of the revenue that telecom guys generate by way of SMSs sent to the special 4-digit numbers. On the other hand, the strength of response for a particular promo or contest can give an idea about the overall listenership for a channel, and can be taken back to advertisers in order to gain a premium. Strong.

Mathematicians have this uncanny ability to make things for the rest of the world. A research paper in math (or any related topic such as Theoretical Computer Science) is judged not on the content or “value add” but on the proportion of the paper covered by math symbols. English is frowned upon, Hindi even more so; and the more complicated the language of the paper, the higher regard it gets from within the clique.

Some concepts are so simple and intuitive that if you take maybe a special case, it can be explained in English in maybe a page. However, how can this happen? Mathematicians thrive in the complex world (no pun intended, though they keep imagining things), and their power will be lost if anything they say is simplified. So complicated it shall remain.

I’m currently reading something which, if explained in a 2-dimensional space, can be explained clearly and intuitively using a couple of diagrams. However, the paper wouldn’t have been accepted if it were putting across a concept so straightforwardly. A p dimensional space has to be introduced. Matrix algebra brought in. Loads of sigmas and pis thrown across the place, and efforts taken to make sure that the knowledge remains within the preserve of mathematicians. All in the name of formality.

I did my BTech project in Theoretical Computer Science. And wrote my report in English, eschewing symbols and integrals as much as possible. It was touted as “the worst project report I’ve ever seen” by one of the examiners, “it isn’t formal enough”.

On another occasion, as part of an algorithms course assignment, I came up with an algorithm and gave an intuitive proof in two lines. My groupmates would have none of it. They used some “formal notation” and wrote what I had told them in 2 lines in 6 pages! Profound.

Yeah of course, MBAs are also guilty of such crimes, but the jargon they use is limited, and most of it has been cracked by the “junta” so it’s not that bad. But these mathematicians… i’m wondering if i could at least put lawyers below them!

The other day I happened to see U R Anantha Murthy (for the uninitiated, he is a Kannada novelist and won a Jnanpith for Samskaara a while back) at the airport and was reminded of the impending name change – starting this November, the English name of Bangalore will be changed to BengaLuru.

My fundamental issue with this name change is that not too many people in the world can actually pronounce “BengaLuru”. The capitalization of the L is not a typo, because it is not the normal ‘l’ sound. This sound is produced from the top of the palate (similar to T in Tomato or D in Do)and I have so far observed it in only a handful of languages (kannada, malayalam, marathi, etc.). ‘L’ is not an easy sound to produce unless you’ve been speaking it since childhood, and this will mean that a large number of people won’t be able to pronounce “BengaLuru” accurately.

In this context, does it make any difference if it is called Bangalore or Bengaluru (note that i haven’t capitalized the l here)? The Kannada name has always been BengaLuru, and will remain so. What joy will we get by changing from an inaccurate name to a hopelessly mispronounced one? Kannadiga pride? no way, the average Kannadiga doesn’t care for the English name of the city.

It’s just a gimmick and will waste millions of VAT money in painting signboards, official whatever and so on. Thought the government has better things to do than this!

people i travel with to and from office are software developers. yesterday i found out that all of them joined from the same firm. I thought it was a really good large-scale poach and told them that. And they said that it was actually a “build operate transfer” model, a la what we see in developmental projects.

They were all employees of firm X who were initially engaged in building a project for firm Y. Once the product was made, they stayed on at Y maintaining it for a while. And soon, they will shift from X’s payroll to Y’s! An aghast me was then told that this kind of a thing is really common, and firms like X actually operated on this model.

Build, operate, transfer. Build a team. Train them. Operate the client’s systems. Transfer the employees. Awesome!

On a related note, i figured out that software developers package themselves according to the programming language they are most comfortable in “I am a Java coder” or “I am a C coder”. When they figured out that i have a degree in Comp Sci, the first thing they asked was the number of programming languages i know.

For an “outsider” like me, it’s so damn counterintuitive. Despite having done most of my programming in java, i can’t code in java without a book and the APIs handy. I believe as long as you are comfortable with the concept of procedural programming, you can program in any damn thing easily. It’s more about the understanding of concepts rather than the knowledge of a language – the latter can always be tackled with a book in hand.

interesting how the industry works!

My firm has this program called “give together”, which is our attempt at Corporate Social Responsibility. During the course of the next one week, the firm will work with kids from an orphanage for one day, having a blood donation camp on another and organizing a rally on Alzheimer’s day on the third. Of course, our employees have to actively participate in the initiative, so we are being asked to volunteer.

So you have the MD and a couple of admin assistants walking around office trying to bully people into volunteering. We will all be there at the Alzheimer’s rally, looking bored and going through the motions. We will be playing with the orphans, but the young ones will easily figure out that we are playing with them because our boss is telling us to. There will be a blood donation “camp” in office. Some of us will be engaged in giving frooti to the donators, and the rest of us will be donating. Unwillingly. I would rather give my blood on a need-basis than giving it to a blood bank and not know where it will go.

Corporate social responsibility indeed…

When our MD came round yesterday asking us to donate blood my boss said “i’m afraid there isn’t enough blood in my alcohol”.