Looking into the horizon

For those who moan over the annual food inflation at 14.55 percent , comes salt for the wound. India! hailed as the second largest country in rice production will be importing rice after 21 years. How and why are two serious questions that everyone wants to look into. Rice being the backbone of India with high percentage of consumers in its eastern and southern parts, measuring the impact of this rice import in common man's (Indian citizen) life is crucial. How and why it happened? We all know India's agricultural sector depends greatly on the monsoons. This year the monsoon has failed. Government reports 23% below normal monsoon. This also is rated as the worst in 37 years . So the impact is evident and justified. The state cannot be held responsible for failed monsoon. We have to accept the decision with gumption. This year's poor monsoon has raised doubts about the output of summer-sown crops popularly called as kharif crops. The estimated shortage of production is...

Recently, there was some resource reallocation in our company. Ours was a team of twelve members. The schedule and technology demanded more. I had a one-on-one session with our mentor and brought up the issue. He said he cannot allocate more resource to our team. The decision is not a big surprise given the engineering strength we have but the reason is. Precisely, what I wanted was to put forward details of the resource requirement not an actual resource allocation. Our mentor mentioned that my current manager can handle only 'this much'. I thanked god he didn't mention 'this bunch'. That would turn the pointers on us. To be frank, I consider our team as a group of self motivated and disciplined individuals (blah! that includes me too). Till I read this Seth Godin article on Dunbar's number , I thought managing a team like ours is not a real big deal. Though he talks about building tribes, I got what I wanted. In his book "Good to Great" Jim Collins q...

Union Minister for Human Resource Development Mr. Kapil Sibal's this statement , has cropped issues related to schooling in India. Yielding to the pressure, Mr. Sibal overturned and said that the issue will be left to the hands of the IIT Council. Not only the premier IITs, the next graded NITs have also taken up the issue of raising the qualification marks. The issue brought out the grip of muffling coaching centers in the school education. Some IIT aspirants even quit school and join the coaching centers. They can privately prepare for their board examinations which demands only 60 percent marks. I recollect the hay days of my school education. I am from south Tamil Nadu. I should say that education system was rather bad. Teachers in the school often run their own tuition centers. They won't complete the syllabus in the school. The inclusion of the laboratory internal marks had a real stranglehold on the students. Teachers urge the students to join the tuition centers run by ...

Today a 25 year old infosys employee was arrested for raising a bomb scare at Delhi airport. Reason for such an act is so simple, he feared of missing his flight. The chain of events is as follows Abhishek Gupta (25), was coming from Lucknow to Delhi in Gorakhnath Express. He expected to reach Delhi by 0600 hrs. He had to catch the 0845 hrs GoAir flight to Bangalore. The train got delayed. He called the GoAir's call centre prior to the departure of the flight and asked to reschedule his journey and put him on the next flight. But his plea was rejected by GoAir authority. Desperate Gupta called up the staff again and informed that there was some suspicious object on the plane. The passengers were set down and the bomb disposal squad was put on service. Gupta reached the airport by 0930 hrs and asked for a boarding pass. Thats it! our officials picked his collar!! Being a software professional myself I compared myself with Gupta. In our company, we speak about culture a lot. Both lif...

Accept that he is a good filmmaker with films like 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Pianist'. Being good filmmaker doesn't mean that he should be treated above the law. The case of Roman Polanski is gore as seen in some of his films. Here is the timeline of the case. March 12, 1977 - Polish film director Roman Polanski, widower of murdered actress Sharon Tate, was on charges of luring a 13-year-old girl under the pretext of photographing her, then drugging and raping her. March 26, 1977 - Conviction on the charges could send Polanski to prison for up to 50 years. Polanski, 43, remained free on $2,000 bail. August 10, 1977 - Court ordered that psychiatrists appointed by it will examine Roman Polanski in Los Angeles if he can be labelled as a 'mentally disordered sex offender'. September 20, 1977 - A 90-day psychiatric study is ordered by the court to to help the judge decide his sentence. February 3, 1978 - Roman Polanski flees from United States and ar...

A forwarded mail says When your friend loses his job it is recession , when you lose your job it is depression I don't know in which state I am in, but the recession is taking its toll globally. An act of desperation and the tough job market is causing women to dance in strip clubs. Here is an interesting article which speaks about job market, job security, women and 'thick skin'. Is there any such options available for men?

Microsoft has released a new report titled Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analysis . Microsoft says This document explains the various browser and network components and how each piece can impact performance when benchmarking. Interesting fact as per the report is IE loads mozilla.com faster than Firefox, and Firefox loads microsoft.com faster than IE. Well! it might be evoking controversies soon.

So everything is going on around the global recession. The blame game started. The West is pointing fingers on Asia for the economic recession. If the mentality gets its steam then analysts suggest that we could possibly see a protectionist approach from the west. A future protectionist approach is clearly evident with the way economists see the policy reforms of Mr. Obama. Mr. Geithner, the US secretary of treasury is already blaming China's foreign exchange policies . When the growth of China has slowed down (from 11 to 6 percent), it is clearly a blame game from the west. It is truly an adaptation of the facts to implement the protectionist approach. Mr. Obama is not promising at all in the economic reforms.

Mr. A. R. Rahman bagged two oscars. 1. Best Original Score 2. Best Song Greatest of achievements indeed.

Confidentiality nowadays is almost a sick word. Some of the disturbing news are the latest leakages. 1. Oscar winners list (It is also termed as hoax by the Oscar spokesperson) 2. U2's upcoming album No Line On The Horizon has been leaked on to the web and is widely available on Torrent sites. May be the concerned professionals should check the leakages. I recommend a glue stick :)

In a strange chain of incidents, chennai lawyers and police officials set a path-breaking example . The list of incidents happened as below 1. On 17-Feb-09, Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy was manhandled and abused by a group of lawyers for his anti LTTE stand. 2. On 19-Feb-09, arrest of their fellow colleagues is protested against by some group of lawyers. 3. Police lathicharged the protesters. 4. The lawyers pelted stones on police officials. Eventually, the police station is burnt. 5. A judge is injured. The notable point is; all these events took place in the high court campus. Now I have few questions, where the legal proceedings for these incidents will be carried out? Who will carry out the proceedings? Who will be given the justice and who will be punished?

In a worst case of political back-stabbing, Malaysian opposition politician Elizabeth Wong, a spinster has been intruded of her privacy. Naked photos of her while sleeping were taken and were circulated through mobile phones. She offered to resign for the sake of her 'party and its struggle for the people' . What makes the matter worst is a statement by one of the ex-chief ministers, Dr Khir Toyo. He says She is a single person. How can she allow a man into her room when they are not married? What's the status of their relationship? So, when you want to extort a woman, rub of her credentials by intrusion. Ask her to sleep fingers crossed that no one photographs!! Politics at its very dirty end.

The Japanese Finance minister Mr. Shoichi Nakagawa slurred in the G7 conference and has lost (he called it resignation) his post. He said that it is due to a heavy dose of cold medicine. Well Mr. Shoichi!! you are in a hot seat, whether you are drunk or drugged, you should feel the heat.

How many of us felt bad for delaying a kiss?.. But in the Warrington Bank Quay railway station, officials have found that kissing causes delays and so have erected signboards. That should certainly impress Pramod Muthalik, but he has to strive to find such 'technical' reasons before posting agendas.

The valentine's day is over. Actually I wanted to oppose Ram Sena but could never imagine one like the Pink Chaddi Compaign . Its not a sort of opposing that Ram Sena could have expected. We were discussing about the compaign and one of our friends asked why Pink ? Another replied, " Its the colour of fools " (but I really don't know from where he read that) and another pointed out that it is regarded as the colour of feminism (this might be of some relevance to the compaign). Well ! the compaign has been really given some thought :) Many women have written about the campaign. I liked the articles written by Suchitra Krishnamoorthy and by Sagarika Ghose . Suchitra writes I understand your intention dear “pinkchaddicampaigner”, but If you want to become a goddess please dont behave like a whore. For Gods sake …Look at Pramod Mutaliks (the Sri Ram Sene chief’s) face… and lets ignore him for the bully and loser he is. He dosent merit all this fuss. Does he deserve s...

Last vacation I went home to see my mom. She is a Postal Assistant in the head office (HO) of my hometown. As we discussed some issues, she start complaining about her work pressure. The total HO has been computerised and still she couldn't cope up with her assignments. Technology has become so intimidating that the senior generation couldn't learn the fundementals or atleast not prepared to learn. Its obvious that the number of VRS is nowadays in its raise. Its time for a change, age-wise, technology-wise, energy-wise and attitude-wise. It would be the wiser thing to do in modern world unless until the senior generation matches the juniors' content. But the change should be unanimous with every department willing to oblige. I couldn't understand why political administration still attenuates youngsters. Rahul Gandhi seems to be different. Already a lot is being dealt about him. Experience, tagname, youngster, the future..... everything is swiveling around him. Here is...

India went on with five bowlers, dropping one of its bastman and that has led to its downslope. Indians are five down at Faisalabad and are still 106 runs short to avoid a follow-on. Unless Pathan and Dhoni bring up a good display, Indian onslaught is sure. If India loses this game, I am sure there would be lot of cants against Greg and Dravid.

In Tamil Nadu, TV channels have a real thrust. With ruling and the opposition parties functioning channels for and of their own, we've already witnessed many petty issues being politicised. This move by the CM Jayalalitha is different. She wants to have a bite at the root.

Jack Schofield of Guardian points out how well our attention data can be used. He quotes We're entering an age where it can be extremely comprehensive, and very effectively exploited, not just by merchants but by governments. That really is scary. Absolutely true !! when seen in a holistic manner. I dunno how I could fight out these pugilists. Those who started living life also in bytes, remember you are being tracked and trapped !!! As pointed out by Jack, "In internet nobody knows you're a dog" . Contrary to that, you don't know how doggy you are.