thecollegedays

Indian exports, naukri (job) and general news

2008-06-30T00:30:00.000-07:00

So I recently joined the fresh crop of graduates from US universities to start work in the silicon valley - as software makers. Feels such a stereotypical kinda situation - u come to the US - get into a univ - slog it out - graduate - get a job at a big software company doing what u did the past 6 years in college - only this time people actually use ur buggy code!!!! Or as in my case - enterprises not people.

Anyhow - this is not about what i am doing or not doing - may be more on that later - but for now - i actually wanted to write more about this incident that happened about 2 weeks ago. I had gone to a community fare in San Jose with my cousins - i have a very beautiful 7 year old cousin sister and the funnest 13 year old cousin brother in the area - and the 7 year old had a dance performance on the Falguni Pathak number - meine payal hai chankayi. I went along with them to check this event out and also see my cousin on stage and boy was i surprised with what i saw there. I saw americans from various backgrounds and races dancing to Falguni's tunes! Of course u may say that this is nothing out of the ordinary. But but...when u see people - hispanics, blacks, whites, asians alike - matching or trying to match foot steps with Falguni Pathak's steps - its an amazing feeling.

What i think is that our music/films/art is a very important export. So i mean although we have mangoes, basmati rice, software, etc which we export - but stuff like arts and entertainment is something which touches the people of other countries much more than most of the other things. And in that - we should take pride. When talking to a (american) friend here - i was introduced to this rather trivial but still new concept of why american culture is so popular - america related tshirts so ubiquitous and why people in general around the world are in awe of america - its Hollywood!! People like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie etc are all over the world and star in such larger than life flicks that people associate america with that and well the rest is obvious observation and left as an exercise in self-discovery to the reader (c'mon u know u like amreeka mostly coz u see good stuff in the movies!!).

Anyways - coming back to where i started from - the new shift into job life from college life sometimes makes me feel like the name of this blog is kinda unfitting. But since i did not want to be pigeon holed into this softechie kinda guy who makes a living out of writing buggy code and then parties on the weekends/pays bills and rinses and repeats - i am doing a bunch of other stuff too - which involves thinking about playing soccer!! :D But more seriously - take a look at kaaledge.com - this is my effort in trying to give something back to people - Oprah said this will help in compounding ur happiness!! So - Oprah - i am following ur principles - the idea is to help students with their preparation to study abroad - specifically in the US.

I think i have had a good run at this - my own preparation was good and went thru a lots of ups and downs and then saw the game from the other side of the table - was part of the admissions committee at Stanford CS dept - so i think i am in a good spot to help students out. Also - i answer specific queries about the application process here: www.kaaledge.com/forums and basically just blog and interview people here: www.kaaledge.com - there are other contributors also - which you can know more about on the site.

Moving On...

2008-06-06T01:48:00.000-07:00

So finally I saw my name among the list of people who are going to get their degrees from the CS department day before yesterday. And only then did i heave a sigh of relieve - I am actually going to end my college days after 6 years!! 6 very event full year!! I might come back actually, back to college - I kinda have this feeling. For now though, its finally time to face the big bad world, the real world - and I am excited.

I feel like I have been able to take a lot out of my years in college, my education and the people i have met along the way. And I want to give back some of that. So here is my plan - I now going to help out people with ambitions of studying at American universities in their application processes and related stuff. I think after being part of the Computer Science Admissions Committee at Stanford, i have a fair bit of understanding as to how the process works and as such having gone through it myself - successfully - and having helped a bunch of my friends - it looks like the next step is to take it forward and help people coming next.

So, please visit kaaledge.com - (kaal as in time, edge as in edge - get the edge in this age!) - my friends who have themselves been involved in the admission procedures of the University of California and Cornell University are also going to assist me on this website. Your questions are welcome - here kaaledge.com/forums.

Here is what we are going to tackle:

Not sure which colleges you should apply to given the 1000s of colleges out there? Worry not - we can help you with that.
Not sure what should be put down in your SOP? We have written and seen many successful essays, we can help you here.
Not aware of what a good recommendation should say - we got you covered.
And all your other what , where and how questions!!

So, i will continue to blog - personal stuff here - but college related stuff goes onto kaaledge.com!!

So see you on kaaledge guys!!

The Big S

2008-04-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

Its not quite often that you hear news about a very close friend suffering from a possible terminal disease and learning about another close friend's sexual tendencies leaning equally between the two sexes - all on the same day. However, I am not going to write about that on this blogpost - even those these were ground-falling-beneath-me events. Some other interesting things have happened. I have graduated from Stanford. Finally! For those of you who think it was hard - u are wrong - it was excruciatingly hard. And not just academics - those i dealt with - it was the whole experience which made is an extra bit harder - and as with everyone - i feel my time of about 1.5 years was spent tougher than most - because of certain events which took place - need a huge big blog to talk about that.

Anyways, now that i am part of the real world - working in the real world, away from the protective shield of a university campus (not technically as i still live on campus) - it feels good and bad. Good because i finally dont have to worry about homework and exams!! And i am finally out a freakin class room after 6 years. Bad because - well - now I need to make a name for myself. Need to learn so much more that they dont teach you at Stanford CS Department. Live up to the expectation of a Stanford Grad.

An odd thing happened immediately after i got done with my exams and started with spring break. I entered Safeway - and it was morning time. I had just entered and without thinking - i looked down at my chest - where my heart is. I knew i was wearing the Stanford-Red Colored jacket - with the Stanford S near the left breast pocket. I looked down at that S - just to make sure it was there. This was most instinctive - I did it almost unconsciously. Everyone in the bay area knows what S stands for - to them - S has always been Stanford and i just wanted to tell myself that i had that S on my jacket.

This to me was a surprise. I had never thought like this before - that i needed to see the S to re-assure myself - of myself. But the moment i was out of Stanford - i thought i needed it. Which is strange. I have always told myself to be associated with good things but not to be defined by them - i have always tried to create my own image - not be known in the shadow of something big. And so this event was strange. I guess the big S is something good to be associated with - but not something to depend on. The big S opens a few doors in life - but to walk through to the other side - big S cant do much - you need to do that on your own. Which reminds me of a car game i used to play as a kid in Saudi - at the start of the race - the animation character used to say this to the player - "From now on, you are on your own intruder!"

What it takes to get into stanford ?(short version)

2008-03-27T04:12:00.000-07:00

Recently i have received a larger than expected number of emails and queries as to what it takes to get into stanford. I am not claiming that i am any sort of authority or any sort of seer - who knows what it takes. But what i do have it the opportunity of being in the company of people who make such decisions and people who got in as a result of those decisions and also i have been in a position to be able to influence such decisions. Here is a very short analysis of what it takes to get into a Masters program at Stanford:

Good Grades at undergrad
Make that great grades
A good/great recommendation from someone who matters or is well known
A publication at a top-tier conference or a journal
A summer that was well spent and you have something to show for it
Helps to be from a top-tier university already (though not a necessity)
As few mistakes as possible in recommendation letters/SOPs/Transcripts
GREs on the higher side are always and always better than low scores on GREs
Remember - all GRE sections are important

Elaboration coming soon...

Why Stanford? (Before starting with the course)

2008-03-17T01:05:00.000-07:00

My last week at stanford starts tomorrow. And you know - its sounds so cliched, but - it went by fast!! I dont wanna say - "Oh it feels like just yesterday i was this boy in Gurgaon who was driving down to the Indira Gandhi International Airport to take the British Airways flight to San Francisco yada yada yada...". No - it went by fast, but it was not easy and more than my flight here - i recall the thousand or so instances in the past 1.5 years where i would so long to be back in the security of home/my country/my job at Tekriti/my family/loved ones - and still do - all in all - IT WASNT EASY - so back off!!!! :D

But hey i am almost at the last lap, hopefully Claire should be able to push my file forward at the end of this month and give me the go ahead so that i can walk on June 15th. And if you thought I was done - you are wrong - after graduation - the next tension is that of visa. Anyways...

So I was thinking...what did i leave the comforts of an almost royal life back home in Gurgaon and come here - away from family and friends - to this Valley called Silicon Valley! Well, here are some thoughts which might have helped me not only make the decision, but also, kept me going through this sometimes arduous journey as an international student on this campus.

For one, the brand Stanford University is a very positive brand to be associated with. I think this was one of the chief reasons for me to apply as well as accept the offer for MS - I very much liked the Cornell MEng program - 1 year in duration - and i had a full scholarship from Arizona as well - but i dont think these guys could beat Stanford in terms of the brand it has. Especially for engineering and more so for computer science, I think Stanford has, through years of hard labour and diligent effort, enshrined itself on the minds of students and non-students alike - as far as engineering is concerned (this is not to say that other depts are lack luster - in fact they are as good if not better!).

Also, the fact that Computer Science at Stanford ranks as one of the best departments anywhere in the world - this is pretty compelling - my first choice at that time was berkeley and in fact i was very keen on San Diego as well ( i was interested in bioinformatics) - but in the end - the fact that Stanford and Berkeley were at par and since i had received rejects from both Berkeley and San Diego - i was more than lucky to have received an admit from Stanford.

Stanford and Berkeley are the basic fuel for the Silicon Valley to function. And Silicon Valley in turn provides the next big opportunity to graduates of these universities. Its this virtuous cycle in this area which makes it so unique. It is hard not to grab the first opportunity to be here. A similar analogy goes as follows - i mean if you have the best schools in the middle of no where - you can attract good faculty and may be good students - but that doesnt necessarily attract good businesses - like consider for a second the difference between Allahabad and Bangalore. Allahabad has some really good universities in that area and some really top notch research happens there - but do you have any known big businesses there? Ever heard of a Microsoft office in Naini?? No right. But on the other hand - Bangalore has everything in place - good univs, good research, good students, good businesses. In general, the students there in Bangalore have it much better than those out there in Allahabad. I had felt this "distance pang" when i was in Allahabad and i did not want to face it again - so it was a no brainer to choose Stanford over another other university.

Network! I had a small network here at Stanford to start off - even before i came to Stanford. But just the fact that so many smart people i knew or had heard about were at Stanford or closeby - it was again a big plus - and in general - the fact that you have Stanford right in the heart of the Silicon Valley, right next to Sand Hill Road, and within a few miles of some of the most mind-blowing companies in the world - its a huge plus in terms of trying to build up a good network of people.

A few names like Jeff Ullman, Jennifer Widom, Hector Garcia-Molina, Don Knuth, Rajeev Motwani, Pat Hanrahan, Andrew Ng, Mendel Rosenblum - some of the names who have changed the way we think about computer science in the recent past - all sit in the Gates Building on Serra Street! It be able to take classes with them, to study under their tutelage - was a huge attraction.

During the time i was trying to decide which universities I would apply to - I actually did not even think of applying to MIT - even though it was among the best CS departments out there. The reason was that I wanted to go to a non-specialty school. I had spent 4 years at IIIT-A, which was a hard core specialty school - with nothing more 1 full fledged department with a number of related labs. I wanted to experience first hand classes in the history departments, classes in the philosophy department, go take dance classes, learn golf and/or tennis and stuff like that. I think a university like Stanford allows that very readily - many US univs also have this - but in general I wanted a broader education now - which is sort of unintuitive - as its the other way round - one gets a broader education in undergrad and then a more focused approach for grad school. But hey - who says I take the same old much beat path!

Passing Travelers

2008-03-11T01:32:00.000-07:00

The past few days, as you may already know, i have been traveling. And if you have ever backpacked, you know its a lot of fun. But the worst part is if you are trapped in a hotel room alone in an unknown city, where you know no one. I mean the first day of my trip to San Diego i was bored to my boots as i knew no one in the city and as such was tired from travels and even my friends at the hostel well. But someone, later on in my stay in San Diego, i managed to meet people and somehow get an insiders view of the city. Such meetings with locals and their sort of guided tours and hospitality are what makes ones travels more interesting and enriching. Thats what you take away from the trip, not the hotel room or stuff like that.

But interestingly, this week i had this unique opportunity to show someone around Stanford, who was like me a travelers. Ajay Jain was on a business cum book promotion trip to North America and since i had a window of time Monday afternoon - i agreed to show him around campus. It was a nice meeting with a mechanical engineer/MBA turned writer. I have always enjoyed writing and hence, i felt it was good to meet a writer first hand. He gifted me a copy of his book - Lets Connect - Using LinkedIn to get ahead at Work. In general, an exchange of ideas is all important and that is what happens at times like these.

I think traveling and hosting travelers are unique opportunities to build connections, learn, grow in thought and openness and in general - a welcome change from the mundane activities of life. Highly recommend either of those options!

Traveling and Relaxing

2008-03-05T23:46:00.000-08:00

First off, I dont know why i named my post Traveling and Relaxing - i mean traveling is ok, but there has definitely not been much relaxing in the past few days. Well then again, it depends on your definition of relaxation. I was out to San Diego this weekend and Monday for this conference - GSP WEST. So nice of Dave to get me the waiver, coz without it, i would certainly have gone bankrupt. It cost me a leg and an arm to get the tickets done for this conference to San Diego, but little did i know it would cost me even more to actually rent a car for 4 days there. I am on the streets literally now!! But hey, its fine - i had a blast in Diego and met so many nice people at the conference and in general along my trips. Well worth it.

I actually stayed at an international students hostel on 5th ave. By the way, if you are ever in San Diego as a student, i definitely recommend this place, its an absolute fantastic place to stay - 2 nights for $50 including breakfast and is very clean. They even have trips to Tijuana, etc. I met a Japanese guy - I so forgot his name right now - I think Takashi - but we had a nice cross-cultural share of thought over beer at a nice little down town pub. Mostly over what America came off as to us outsiders. He had interesting things to share. What he said was - he was most impressed by the way the Americans market things. For example, he said, he went to a LA Lakers vs Miami Heat game at the Staples Center and they gave out free stuff - and gave out free tickets to others, etc. He thought that the Americans really knew how to give a great customer experiences to their 'users' (sorry i am too used to software lingo) - and i totally agreed with him. He said, he thought American was much better than he had imagined. Well, thats basically a really satisfied customer right there.

Also, these past 7 days or so have been an extended lesson on how to pitch an idea in 3-10 minutes to people. Me and Suchit participated in the VC3 at Stanford and then I had meetings with people in San Diego and with people at DFJ, not to mention people in Stanford. This has been fun and at the same time exhausting, trying to explain an idea as succinctly as possible without eating up a lot of time - is an art and I need to learn it asap. As such, it helps to have faith in the idea that you are pitching.

I also just got over my work as part of the CS Admin committee - and i so want to blog my brains out about it and how - in the end - i was disappointed by many, many of the decisions that were made. But for reasons best kept unblogged - i will not blog about it in the recent future.

All in all, it has been a good learning experience for the past few days. I hope Suchit gets over his quarter soon, so that i can start some real work real soon.

Business Trip and marriage!

2008-02-25T03:50:00.000-08:00

I may well be on my first business trip in the US - or for that matter - ever!! The Graphing Social Patterns Conference (West) is going to take place in San Diego, CA on March 3-4. I have an important meeting that i just cannot miss on the 4th back at Gates, so i definitely cannot be there for both the days, but even the first has some really good sessions lined up. And plus, San Diego is less than 2 hours away by air and hopefully i can get a ticket for less! (Fingers crossed) But the problem is that I, being the poor grad student that i am, dont have the money to actually pay the $795 registration fee for the conference. Thats where i am using my network! The conference planner/organizer - Dave McClure (the guy in the picture above) has been my professor in the Stanford Facebook Course - and so i called Dave up late Sat evening but he was putting his kids to bed. So i called up again Sunday morning and he said he might be able to get me some sort of discount. Well, I would definitely need a very heft discount!!! But, whatever, if he does manage to get me a discount, I am buying the ticket!!

I would have loved for Suchit to be on that plane with me if I did in fact go, but unfortunately Suchit is busy with stuff around those dates. So he cannot make it! So while we are talking about Suchit, i think this provides the perfect segway into explain my relationship status on facebook - I am married to this bastard!! Can you believe it?? Well, its just a relationship status and so please do not attribute much more to it - its a few mouse clicks gone wrong and as such i have had enough keechad (mud) slanged on me because of that - but i assure you of my chastity! The reason for that status is that we guys spent so much time together recently because we were/are working our ass of on stuff on facebook and other more mainstream consumer internet ideas that it seemed that we were almost married! And our happiness lied in each other happiness!! So, to sensationalize the matter, this step of changing the relationship status was taken. As such I believe if you are looking to form a team with someone to work on an idea - you should try to envision in your head - how would u feel if you were married to the person in question - coz being the initial members of an idea-execution-team requires a lot of discipline, effort, work, hard work, etc...

Why you should write? And other short stories!

2008-02-21T03:28:00.000-08:00

So I am definitely of the opinion that no matter which field of study you belong to, no matter what you do in your life, no matter how rich or how poor you are - YOU SHOULD WRITE! Why..why...why the hell - your information starved soul asks - why should we all write?? Well, there are many things here - but the one thing that is important is that writing makes you reflect on what you are, what you are doing, where you are heading - sort of an exercise in introspection! In fact i heard somewhere, that someone had advised someone else that while they are in college - they should write everyday!

Now some of the writing can be personal which you dont want everyone reading - so maintain a personal diary of sorts - you dont have to always blog your brains out - just buy a notebook and a pen and keep it by your bedside, or your study so that its out there where you can see it - with easy access - i think i should stop before i sound like a daadi maa - (grand mother!)

Another thing writing helps you do is - being a sort of healing process - it becomes a vent for so many things pent up in that dark closet called "ur brain"!

There are many other reasons like - increasing ur typing speed - helping with spellings/grammar etc...but well you know better! I should end now - i m dragging this blog post like Ekta Kapoor drags her serials!! Oh my God how do people even tolerate this!! BTW - interesting piece of trivia -- OK OK BEFORE THAT - i just received my first edition of the Harvard Business Review - I was gifted a 1 year subscription by Awantika on my birthday - and i am soooo excited about it!! Anyways, I read in HBR that just one show on star TV - KBC increased the market share of star TV from 20% to 80% - not only KBC but all other shows increased their TRPs thru it!!

Bill Gates on Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back

2008-02-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

Written in a very journalistic-notes format:

bill gates lecture - on software innovation entrepreneurship and giving back

really preppy background music before the start of the key note at the memorial auditorium

ladies and gentlemen - please welcome president john hennessy

President Hennessy -
"our students cannot imagine a world without pcs
about gates - he had a vision of building a stand alone software company

about stanford family - retail business and then rail roads

HP - first silicon valley start up

I served on the board of MSR (Microsoft Research)

dedication to serving the public good
find solutions to the worlds most challenging problems
research and teaching tha can make diff in the lives of people
mid-1990s - MS was taking all his time
at that point they didnt have the time
in 97 they started the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation

Please join me in welcoming Bill Gates to our camapus"

Gates -
"Its great to be back here at Stanford - MS CEO went to Stanford - though he never completed his degree!! We owe a lot to this school - and collaboratioon that is going on today - really are fantastic...I spent the afternoon talkin to the faculty and shring ideas -my optimism about tech is deeply underscored by these developments and research...

Now I am full time at the foundation and part time at MS - who knows what it will be like to make the change - i have been working on MS since i was 17 - every day i worked on it - so i thought it might be tough!

The video ended by describing Bill as a person "who just doesnt believe in paying more then 7 $ for a hair cut"!

what software will do in the future:

initially no one thought of software being important at all - it was mostly bundled with hardware- computers it self were more threatning - people thought punch cards to be stapled with bills to mess up the main frames - we had to believe that the cost of the hardware would go down - and volumes would go up and only then would software would become a gigantic industry. today this industry is gigantic and the range of solutions is incredible -

10 years ago i talked aobu the digital age - 10 years later many of those activities in the rich countries we take for granted - my daughter doesnt know what a record is - phone book or a print based encyclopedia would be equally antiquated.

the impact of this second digital decade will be far more dramatic - part of it coz the foundation we have - over a billion PCs - many billions of mobile fones - over 300 broadband connections - China has more broadband than America - its fantastic tha tthe internet has made the world a smaller place than it was - now almost everything should be digital - thats a big mindset change - even for education - test scores see correlations etc - education will split into different things - how many univs should give lectures on physics - very few coz who ever does that well should put it out on the internet and so - you have the best teachers of college curriculum - for now mostly MIT - but i expect something from Stanford soon.

for someone who works in an office - they are information starved - try to look at key indicators- to collaborate with people far off - these people are not yet fully impowered - shall i send email or instant messaging - its way better than it was 10-20 years ago but its nowhere close to where it could be. You are shortening design life cycle. Power of software will give them better tools - not only to model - but better understand what they are doing.

What Gordon moore said will remain true for the next 10 years - the bottle neck are seen only at a few places - brute force of clock speed is not going to help us - as we connect public data - we need privacy - security - proper controls - there are some fundamental advancements in CS that we need to drive - cameras that when combined with software to find who is where and so on -

natural user interface - like IPhone - MS Surface - i am a big believer in - and keep investing in - is the tablet device - cheap - eventual replacement for the paper based life -
now we are talking about not just computers on the desk but also computers in the desk which knows where you keep things and so on...we need a whole new generation of software who can use that...

dichotomy of video on TV and video on internet will be brought together - there is no dividing line between video games and TV - they are part of the same spectrum - today we are still very device centric and rely on the users to tranfer data from pc to mobile to pc - when we have the infinite power in the cloud - we can do that for the user -

failure of abstraction - image 2 banks with almost same product offerings but if you see their underlying systems you can find a million lines of code that is different - failure of abstraction - and so we should have the immense computation to get to better abstractions -

we spend a bit over $6B a year on long term research - its surprising to me how little research is funded by industry - now we see a range of cos like GE saying that this is an important thing - unfortunately what happened was that companies like Bell Labs, PARC etc who did spend money on research ended up not being able to gain the monetary benefits from it - as much as they would have liked to - this became a bad learning for other companies..

when we think about pure science the role of software is becoming important - back in the day when asked what is the language of science - it was math - today - its software like databases/analysis software for massive amount of data -

On giving back---
ratio of the money spent on baldness compared to malaria is 50 to 1. we have this disparity - as great as our system is - it doesnt encourage an indsutry if there is not a market for it - we need to have univs and industry to work on stuff whos' success is measured by not the market forces but other sources - we have one group in MSR India which is a group of social scientists who go out there into the rural areas with TV and DVDs to help the people there and how technology can work.

One of the things i will be spending time on is reaching out to univs and companies - to try to make them do more - univs have a big role to play here - students should not be allowed to graduate without having had a first hand experience to what is going on in other parts of the world -

its a wonderful time to be a student and see the great work you can do.

Back from sabbatical!

2008-02-19T02:59:00.000-08:00

Its been such a long time since i got to write another blog post. Its not that i got bored or anything, its just that we (I and Suchit) have been extremely busy working our asses off on facebook and other stuff outside of course work and research. I would probably start showing signs of Carpel Tunnel syndrome if i started to write about all my experiences between Nov 5 2007 and now - its been a helluva ride! And it has really - no kiddin - and it continues to be exciting timed looking forward. Its amazing how much these past few months have taught me about business in general, and internet commerce in particular. And also picked up good skills while i was at it - like photoshop and a few hacks in mysql and and php!

Today i just want to write a few words - wanna head to bed soon - but this being a long weekend, me and suchit had decided to go on a weekend get away. The best i could think of was going kayaking in Monterey and we loved it. Mona and Neha decided to come along and we had the most fun times in recent history - which in internet lingo is =~ 4 weeks! I like kayaking coz its on water - i have never been afraid of water but i never actually got a chance to swim, or ever live close to a water body to which i had access to. Granted that i lived close to the Ganges in Allahabad for 4 year, I never actually took the holy dip until the final days in college - that too was a very memorable experience for me. I think water in general has a good, soothing effect on me! I recommend Monterey Bay Kayaking to everyone! And a nice soothing antakshari session in a hot tub after that :-)

Also, today I got in the mail this years first edition of the Harvard Business Review - my birthday present from Awantika! So, i am going to close on this post right now and try to read a bit of that before sleeping. God, also need to read Obama - Audacity of Hope - and then what about coursework!! Ahhh...another day in the life of a grad student!

Infosys - Making Us Proud

2007-11-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

I just received an email from Connie Chan (if you are stanford CS - u her know all too well!) - who is part of the Stanford Computer Forum - basically our career maker - who interacts and setups up company info sessions. And what surprised me was the company which was holding info sessions is Infosys! Its amazing that an Indian company is hiring right from the intellectual heartland of the US of A. And well TCS does some hiring from Stanford CS as well, but thats mostly from the North America office. But Infosys is much more aggressive and recruits directly for its Bangalore office.

Some of the benefits mentioned are as follows:
"Benefits: Comprehensive compensation package that includes return airfare, allowances for accommodation, food, travel and a monthly stipend; first-hand exposure to one of the world’s fastest growing markets – India; access to senior executives through multiple industry and cultural workshops organized exclusively for interns; platform to interact with a diverse group of employees and interns representing over 50 different nationalities."

Reverse brain drain anyone!

Facebook and The Class

2007-11-05T01:21:00.000-08:00

This quarter i am taking another one of BJ Fogg's classes. Its the much talked about Facebook class. Just for the purpose of being thorough - the official name of the class is - Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook (CS377W). I love this course! I am just having a lot of fun in it. Now if you have taken any CS course (live databases, algos, programming, OS), you might know they are incredibly time consuming and require a lot of hours during the quarter. This course is similar in those terms - asks for a more than reasonable time commitment (though really depends on your motivation) - but its different than all the rest of the cs courses in a very important way - USERS! There is an incredible amount of emphasis which is put in understanding the user needs and their psychology in using apps - especially on facebook. Its surprising that all of computer science equips you with technical know-how of making a good software - writing good code - but somehow the users are pushed to the back seat. The usual considerations of performance, size, error checking, etc are common to almost all software designs - but for most of the courses that i have taken at stanford - the user hasnt really been a big part of the thinking process in designing the solution.

This course is really helping me put things into perspective from the users point of view - and i frequently quiz myself on - What do users want? What will make things easy for them? How do you measure this - quantify this? This is very important in attempting to make a good software - as important as putting in error checking I would say. BJ, Dave, Dan and Yee along with Greg and Rob (a massive 6 member faculty/CA team) do a great job in making students understand what goes on behind successful facebook apps - how to measure success - and once successful, what to do with that! The guest lectures from industry experts on issues most relevant to the class are also very insightful and thought-provoking. All in all - this is exactly why i came to stanford - to study cutting edge technologies. Someone from UK said on a class forum a few days back - that such a thing would never happen in the UK - it would take 6 months to get approval from committees and another 6 months to ratify the syllabus - and by that time the technology would have already been out-dated - ditto for India - but Stanford CS is not No. 1 for being good at hackey sack (which i am sure we are great at too!).

Working with team mates from the Business School (Brett Keintz) and Andrew Gadson (CS senior) is a great learning experience - since i see now the other aspect of making software to which i was never exposed to. In case you are wondering what my team has been up to till now - feel free to check out our app - Dodgeball. The next app due in class is going to be an educational app! Exciting times in the silicon valley! And before i end - here's an interesting piece of trivia - there are only 2 industries in the world which refer to their customers as users - Software and Narcotics. And btw, if you are into reading blogs (duh!), techcrunch ran a story on us.

PS: This post has been mirrored at The Unofficial Stanford Blog

Randy Pausch

2007-10-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

I actually think that I am quite an emotional human being. But usually I try to hide that from people. But somehow I couldnt control emotions after i watched this lecture given by CMU Prof. Randy Pausch. I personally think that this lecture was the best I have ever seen. A brief back ground on the story - Prof. Randy Pausch is one the nation's leading authorities on Virtual World Technology, an expert in HCI and Software Engineering.

He was recently diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer and has about 5-6 months of good health left. I think everyone has a lesson to learn from his talk. He gave a talk in a series which was called - "the Last Lecture" - if you had one last lecture to deliver as a professor, what would that be. But in his case, it was his last lecture in reality. What he said was so relevant and so sweet a story, one couldnt help but feel sad that such a wonderful person is not going to be with us in the near future. He spoke about how once should go about working, so as to be able to achieve their childhood dreams. Actually, there is a hell lot of meaning to what he said which i cannot possible put down in words here, his advise on how to talk to people, on how to respect people, on how to not get bogged down when you hit a brick wall. In fact brick walls are there to keep out people who dont want something, they allow only the people who really want that thing.

He spoke about why parents should let their children color the walls of their room and not worry about the resale value of the house. He was full of wisecracks about his school/college/grad-school life and very humorous in presenting the hard fact that he was not going to live too long.

You should definitely check it out here.

SIA's Welcome to Class of 09 and beyond

2007-10-11T00:08:00.000-07:00

Stanford India Association (SIA) has started the new academic year with a welcome function for the new comers at the Bachtel International Center. The current office bearers of SIA seem to be a highly motivated bunch. Their self-driven methods and dedicated efforts actually bore fruit with the success of their Welcome Party. In a first of its kind panel discussion - SIA hosted a panel of (desi) Venture Capitalists (VCs) living in the Bay Area, all of whom had spent time as students at Stanford, in a discussion moderated by Anand Rajaraman (who, btw I think is one of CS Departments star consulting professors and highly recommend his class cs345a in Winter). The discussions revolved around the role of Stanford, as a univ and as a brand in their lives and how they could leverage it. Also, their views on how best to utilize time at Stanford and sort of the dos and donts of graduate education at Stanford, entrepreneurship, etc. Below is the transcript of the panel discussion which I could barely manage to type in with my meager 30 WPM speed. At some point my fingers bailed out on me, but the sheer energy showed by the panel and their keenness on getting their point through and reaching out to their fellow contrymen/hommies was what kept me going :)

CAUTION: This is written in a very journo-notes kinda way..

Moderator: Anand Rajaraman (Cambrian Ventures)

Panel: Naren Gupta (Nexus India Capitol)
Ajay Shah (Silver Lake Sumeru, Shah Capital Partners)
Neel Bhadkamkar (Monitor Ventures)
Navin Chadhha (Mayfield Fund)

Mohit Gundecha, started off the event - welcoming all the panelists on the dais and said - "our very own people who have made it big in their own way - they had the same dreams which u and i have today - they studied at stanford - an institution instrumental to silicon valley - they are going to talk about leveraging brand stanford and other issues revolving around it."

Anand Rajaraman, the moderator of the panel discussion, started off by asking the following questions to the audience :

how many of u watched 2020?
how many of u are engg majors?
how many want to be entrepreneurs?
how many are going back to India?
how many hv facebook accounts?

Neal and Navin hv facebook profiles..

Start with first question - most of u had the choice of which univ to go to - why did u choose to come to stanford?

Neal - i actually came to stanford as a mid-career person - graduated from iit delhi in 1976 - and i went off and did an mba at hbs and worked in mgmt consulting at boston - got bored - came back to engg - cmu/stanford were the choices I had - knew 0 people in pittsburg and 1 person in silicon valley and so Stanford it was!

Naren: 1969 - IIT Delhi graduate - went to Caltech for masters - stanford looked like a more pragmatic place - caltech more theoretical - broader education possible at stanford -

Navin: stanford 1992 - EE - IIT Delhi - when we are students we look for role models - we were enamoured by vinod khosla - limited horizon and we didnt hv PCs at IITD - we used to sit in front of main frames - curriculum here was very good - and lastly its weather -

ajay: i hd a couple of choices - northwestern - MIT - (engg mgmt.) - i chose stanford - weather - i had an uncle at stanford - Prof. haresh shah -

anand: one thing that the panel agrees on is the weather

anand: What are your best and worst memories at Stanford?

ajay: very tough experience - u actually had to work - another problem is the fees - work constantly between school and work in the computer center - and see how quickly one could finish - memorable exp - having vinod khosla - come by (he was with daisy systems) - talked about his experiences as an entrepreneur - was very inspirational - and at least made me think to want to be an entrepreneur.

navin: worst - orientation - worst nightmare at stanford - losing one of my nails during the first week - didnt know where the hospital was.
plus side: friends, learning from this place - its not only about grades, its the mentorship, the openness of the professor - learning is very diff - challenge ur professors, ur peers, sort of unlearn what u learnt in india and start with a fresh mindset.

navin: after i was here for a year - my professor told me that i am going to retire - did my phd in 2 years and 9 months - not too many negatives - it was much easier place than caltech - kind of a free ride -

neal: when i think back - my biggest hassle in life was always being off balance with a quarter system - coz i came from a semester system - and by the time the quarter had started, it had ended - on the +ve side - the first time i got a chip back after having designed it and sent it to mozes - flipped it on and it worked!

navin: came for masters and phd in 92 - get masters and get phd later on - few of my professors brain washed - they told me to do phd - they told me go to work on video - we came out with very kool technologies - jan 94 - to end of 95 - technology allowed to stream videos over the internet -

Yahoo guys told me to take one year leave of absence - 18 months into the company - very successful in video streaming - MS acquired us - on the same day i had my PhD oral exam. nothing comes for free - i had to make a choice - my parents said - really u are going to drop out of ur pHD?

Naren: i didnt think about making a company - i graduated and took a job with a small co with 50 employees - revenue had grown 100 times - a big co acquired - and bought and i resigned - and everyone told me not to start a company - except my wife and dad - 1990 - took company public - came up from having fun and doing what i love to do ... learnt what not to do when u hv a small company - when u dont hv a clear idea - go and work for a big co - make all the mistakes there -

ajay: reading business week every week, I was very interested in the business aspect of things - and my engg degree was an excuse to be close to business - money part of it is what happens after - not really the main motivator - most enggs particularly are not aware of the social aspects - sometimes bigger than technical aspects - and i think my advice to many of my friends - go work for a large company - see how they do business, how the corporate social culture works - how their internal processes work - and then i think u make a much better entrepreneur - working for a large company is a great way to start ...

neal: i didnt come to stanford to be an entrepreneur - reason - i fundamentally enjoy building things - from building software/hardware i migrated to building companies and help other people build companies - u really hv to do something which u enjoy - my migration in entrepreneurship - i left stanford to join a research lab - from engg i moved to tech commercialization - help spin out companies - saw the early stage action - headed up engg in one of those companies and had an incredible blast - when i was done with that gig - i was looking to be part of another startup - i ended up starting a company which happened to be a venture fund - we are still in the early stage - u hv team issues, u hv customers, various constituents that u hv to satisfy -

At this time, Anand makes an announcement asking people to make way for people standing outside, the room is almost bursting at its seams with people making an effort to soak in every bit of this really rare panel discussion in the Indian community - everyone is listening with rapt attention almost like reading a suspense, page-turner novel.

navin: about working in large cos - i think success can come in anyway - if you are going to sell to enterprises - if you havent worked before - just technology is not going to cut it - u need to understand how customers integrate - legacy systems, etc...

but in 1995 students like me or anand could come out with not friction apps/products - in semi conductors - u need to partner with someone who can help u manufacture - but internet changed all that - silicon valley is a unique place - as a student u are surrounded by mentors - if u know what u do well - focus on that as an entrepreneur - and the ecosystem can help u - if you are good at something how do u - bay area is the best place - first time entrepreneurs do well - an engg with 10 years exp will tell u 10 years why it cant be done..but 80-85% people hv exp..

anand: what are the hot areas for students to get into :

navin: we dont hv any ideas - if we had then we would be starting companies left right center - my job is to pick the best ideas out of the room - keep ears and eyes open - look for the best things which come -

naren: we are looking for ideas from the other side - we only invest in indian companies - my thinking is completely driven from the indian lens...Here is a methodology to find hot areas - what is a compelling need out there - technology is really not the answer to starting companies - what is a compelling need - what can enhance their cell phone exp - retail infra - think about what are the needs out there that u are uniquely qualified to fulfill -

company are about execution - bring people with u who have complimentary expertise - the goal is to the best not second best - be number 1 - u got to hv very high goals - and u got to fill a need - a crying need - and no body can fill that as well..

navin: (jokingly) i would work on number 2 as well...

neal: i get asked that alot - i dont know and none of our partners know - major reasons incubators for the most part all failed was because they thought they know what the hot area was and they pursued that - we look for ideas from other people - we screen those ideas - whether the startup has a unique way to meet that market meet - if you dont hv a team its not gonna happen - in general we find that u will find ideas and opportunities when there is something dramatic changing and change usually creates opportunity...

anand; we all came to the US to study - is the land of opportunity here or in India -

naren: i would say silicon valley (SV) is and always has been the land of opportunites - its a kind of a collection of people who want to do something impossible - and there is nothing that can take that away - india is creating a whole new set of opportunites - change is the biggest reason for opportunites - internet/pc/microprocessor
India is a very very significant opportunity - it is sorta both (india and SV) - leading edge technology and products - india doesnt hv infrastructure - if you have a look at the last several cos - they were not based on unique technology - (example: skype) - how product was packaged - etc - if u can come up with a different business model - can u hv a crm/erp software which is 1/100th the price - think beyond tech - there is a different way to develop drugs - same reliability same way of use - better price point and in a manner people want things to be used...

ajay: different take: in particular it is a very interesting time to be looking into India - lot of VCs hv decided its fashionable to be in India - managerial talents and proper conceptual and presentational talents are really important - in india still that talent is quite weak - and to top it all of - there is a little bit of a situation in india where people are not terribly loyal towards a company or an organization - - you not only have to be trained from tech/business perspective but also trained from a leadership stand point - and i think that many many companies would find that they would want to recruit in india - but they are not able to recruit management

naren: biggest challenge is doing things in time - get it done by friday means get it done by friday - almost every company at the senior management team has a person who has worked in the US - deadlines in India is not gotten thru - part of the communication challenge in India is in employees - cannot communicate vision to employees - that is very critical - that is a huge problem in India...its just the management capabilities -

navin: over the next 1 week, 2 months - write down what do u want to be - do u want to be technologist, want to be a professor, want to be researcher, want to be in business mgmt, or people mgmt,

if you are enamored with cutting edge - this is the place to be -

if u want to make money - more money has been made in india - learn here and go back there - its a rising time - its like appearing in the US in the 50s and 60s - 10 years back when we were graduating, it was hard to get a good job in india from iit - times have changed - really go understand - what u want to be - and once u hv a goal - keep it flexible, follow ur conviction - if you believe in ur self - do it - first answer the question - what u want to believe in -

From audience: How imp is an MBA?

Neal: It can be helpful and its obviously not necessary and it depends on what u want to be good it. SV is unique in that u can be a great engg and be successful but there are other parts of that world where that will not work - this is the place to do it - only place in the world where the rest of the infrastructure is in place to build the teams around urself and fill the parts of the puzzle which go into making a great co - if u go to FL, Boston - it is much much more difficult to find teams of people who hv been there done that who can get into a startup, ramp it up and build it - if you are into marketing/biz dev it would help - if you are in engg - u dont need it -

I highly recommend Tom Buyers course - for enggs..

Ajay: Master of business ADMINISTRATION - doesnt change things into starting a new company, u either hv a sense for it or u dont - MBA is particularly good for finance, not only models but the structure - Tom Buyers course is good for structure of understanding the terms like series A...

Naren: Agree - starting a company look at the talent u can buy and talent u cannot buy - cannot hire

Navin asks: fresh grad from IIT pitches and a fresh grad from IIM pitches- who are u gonna listen to - an MBA possible good for India Bulls, in certain situations MBA could be useful, but the beauty of things in India is that lot of them hv enggs degrees anyway - its good to get people who dont know what cant be done..

Audience Question: What help did you get from Stanford in starting a company?

Navin: In the hall ways of EE, CS - the VC will be roaming around in the hall ways

Aud Q: Talk about failures and mistakes in ur lives

Naren: I think the biggest mistake - was under estimating the competition - we had a unique tech in 1989, and the mistake we made was that we didnt get an exclusive license - under estimating the competition - and the competition we worry about the most is one we dont know about - as Andy Groove said - being paranoid is the best approach - dont worry about the M$/IBM - its gonna be a small companies, since they are very agile.
kEY TO a companies success if adaptability - create a company that is going to last for a long time -

Neal: a consistent and repeated mistake i hv made and many people do - falling in love with the technology and forgetting the market. That a company is making a product for a customer, not a technology.

Navin: If your product is not a pain killer, but just vitamins - dont go for it. Startups dont die of starvation, they die of indigestion - they want to take over M$ the first day.

Ajay: I was an entrepreneur who was not venture funded, and at various points we would not invest, try and make the best with the least, and in many cases we let entire markets go by - its the opposite of picking carefully. (Goes back to the Indian baniya connection). Mistakes are easy to make on every side. Having a few short feedback system - a smaller company has this to its advantage - tech doesnt sustain over time - but a co with the right kind of DNA is they can move quickly and correct quickly..

How best to maximize ur time at Stanford?

Ajay: Great place to meet a lot of people, enjoy and many folks are so immersed in their work to get out of their degrees that u actually miss many parts of benefits of what stanford can bring to you - and u say in hindsight that there are so many things you could hv done - get out of just the indian community - and in 1981, there were not that many indian students, we couldnt hv filled this room - that also pressured us to meet new people and meet a lot more of the world - the forumla u learn are long gone - but there are people u meet..

Navin: the first thing is that remember u are here for a particular reason - dont try to prove urself again and again - leave some hours in the day and week to learn from its environment - and be open to go to the events that happen here - and everybody wants to talk to you - develop certain other extra curricular hobbies - do well in the US - u MUST have leadership skills - play tennis - go look at some other things - what u are doing today might not even be relevant to what you are doing 10 years from now - unix/windows/java

Naren: when i came to caltech - 11 people - when i came to stanford in 1970 - less than a 100 indian students, just to emphasize what ajay and navin said - dont just be in ur comfort zone - get outside - how to interact with people u hv never met - give a talk - and MOST IMPORTANT - be a good listener...customers, employees, ur spouse! Treat people with respect -

Neal: very little if anything - 2 points i jotted down - people and risk - u are ob going to do what u are going to do academically - it will be obsolete and u will start again - get to know the people - make effort to stay in touch - when u graduate stay in touch with the peopple that u hv met - SV is all about risk - force urself to take risk - take risk academically - take courses that u cannot do - take risks career wise - best time to take risks when u are younger...

Fag End of Summer

2007-08-21T21:09:00.001-07:00

So its been sometime before I blogged. Mostly because I have become lethargic - which is a bit of an understatement. Well may be I am being too hard on myself - it becomes a bit tiring working 2 jobs - and getting paid for just one - working almost 15-18 hour days. But hey, I am headed home in just a few days and I am looking forward to that. But its been a hard summer over all. Looking back (mid-way though it may be), if there is one thing that this summer had made me realize is importance of family - and how precious is the feeling of being able to call your life your own.

Also, i now have a dream for myself! Yes, an aim in life if you will! I want to get married at the Stanford University Church. And I am working towards that :-) I guess i realized this only a few weeks into working full time (in case you didnt know - i m at Oracle HQ for the summer) - that i had no one to come home to and I would stay back in the office for insanely long hours. Just like today. This sorta makes me feel bad - I guess the marriage thingie could get rid of that.
This summer I also made many trips to the indian consulate in SFO. I had some passport trouble which i had to sort out. Thankfully, it did get sorted out. But as a side effect, i got to experience that Indians really need a course in "smiling and speaking politely". Thankfully they are efficient - it would have been hell of earth if they were inefficient and impolite. But you have to give it to them for their efficiency. I guess they are also not to be blamed for being impolite, dealing with people like us you really need to be assertive! I must thank the Mr. Bagchi and his staff, Consel at the Indian Consulate General at SFO for being really helpful.

There is just so much i can write about summer, but i think i should head off to home and start work, try to end another ground hog day only to start a new one tomorrow.

rakoFi.com code base acquired

2007-07-27T16:20:00.001-07:00

Well its been a long time since I have blogged, but believe me I spend a lot more time on blogger.com than would be visible. I was actually spending time on other aspects of blogger.com that might interest the developers. Anyways, this post is not for that. I just wanted to let you guys know that my side project with friends from undergrad - rakoFi.com - a web based college market place service has sparked some interest among the start up/entrepreneurial/VC circles here in the Bay Area. One of the founders of studyplaces.com expressed interest in buying us (our code base) out. And after some amount of thinking, we thought that our baby would be nurtured and brought up in a better way in a bigger company. Hence, we signed the papers and off went rakoFi.com into the studyplaces.com.

Anyways, its encouraging to see that something we create was actually of value to someone else. That's the good part about being in the bay area. As I have always mentioned, networking is everything. The people responsible for bringing us and studyplaces.com together were Tekriti Ltd. - my previous work place in Gurgaon. Thanks Gaurav!

Anyways, we are onto bigger and hopefully better things. So keep watching this space closely!

Hello, world!

2007-07-20T02:39:00.001-07:00

I am on the intarweb!

Hello, world!

2007-07-20T02:38:00.001-07:00

I am on the intarweb!

Hello, world!

2007-07-20T02:37:00.001-07:00

I am on the intarweb!

College Crush

2007-07-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

So actually it turns out I am really getting addicted to blogging. I mean who the hell blogs on his way to Vegas. Me and a few of my friends are right now on our way to Vegas - we are driving down US-101 currently and vegas is still 8 hours away. And one of the songs that is playing now reminds me always of a really crazy thing I once did back when I was in undergrad at IIIT-Allahabad.

So back in undergrad I had this thing for a girl in college. She was nice, dark brown complexion, great hair, nice height and she had many other talents which were displayed aptly at Effervescence. So now the thing was that I had really little excuse for talking to this person as she was not in my batch. And of course i had to talk to her, or get paly or whatever. I mean I just had to, but I could find no way to do this. After a month or two of trying hard, I was getting no where. And my frustu-pana was soon approaching its limit. So I can up with an ingenious plan! At least I thought it was ingenious.

I knew that person was taking an economics course, like I had the previous year. Also, I had a thing for economics myself. So I thought why not give a talk in an area of economics which is not covered in class!! Crazy! I know - I was kinda getting interested in game theory and its economics implications and so thought why not take this route to learn GT better and at the same time get a good first impression on her. So I walked up to the professor and told her about my plan (sans the girl motivation behind it!). She couldnt have been more delighted at my proactive-ness, in fact she invited me to give an additional lecture to the MBA class. I was like - WOW! She is a real nice person and really liked the fact that I was interested in economics, not something you see in an engineering school often and also the area was something she was only tangentially covering in her class, so a more detailed lecture would really go a long way - she thought.

So i studied my ass off for the next 3 days and at the end of it - i had a ppt ready for both the MBA class and the BTech class. The class for the MBAs was not something to write home about, but the professor was really supportive and backed me up at places I was exactly crystal clear.

In the class for the BTech guys, I was really excited. Things were going according to plan, and of course she was there! Suchit was accompanying me - sitting at the back - a source of constant support. The whole lecture was over before I could say John Nash - but I thought it could have done the trick and so I was happy with myself.

We sort of got talking from that onward, but I guess it never really clicked between the two of us. And anyways, with time I was beginning to live more of GT. At the end, I ended up using the lecture gig as a whole paragraph in my SOP. That person graduated successfully and of course we are still in touch, but I guess this one was not meant to be! But I smile every time I hear that song - which song - I would prefer not to tell so as to avoid making things so obvious!

Do you still eat your dinner on a leaf?

2007-07-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

Ok so been a long time since i blogged last, mostly because I have been lazy but also because i have been running around a lot. So anyways, has it ever happened to you that you are outside your country (India) and some one who is not from India (and who has really the IQ of a frog) comes up to you and says - "hey so do you guys in India still eat on leaves?" What do you do with such a person? I actually start out by laughing at them, on their face. And then go on to have this debate with myself whether i should start by punching them in the eye or in the stomach. Not really! But I mean for the past few days I have been meeting people who are so ignorant of the minor details and are so stuck in time and still hold on to idiotic stereotypes about us. And what is funny is that when you try to correct them - they feel they are right and we are just bullshitting them. And this is especially true of the Europeans.

Actually I guess its us who are part of the problem. I mean of course we have problems in our country, but that doesn't mean a person from Romania should come to me and ask me how in the world does your country have enough money to buy fighter jets. My reply to him would have been that not only can we buy fighter jets, we make'em and sell them also and not to stop there, we can buy your country as well which is smaller than our smaller states.

I mean i think we should start being a bit more aggressive in asserting that we dont take things sitting down anymore, not that we did this before but we had a lot more to be humble about few years ago than we have today. People of our country are working hard to make a mark for ourselves in the global arena and also for our country. We are racing ahead in terms of economic growth and prosperity. I mean you all know how well we are doing, I dont want this post to turn out like another India Shining Ad but just want to ask people out there who are abroad to start standing up against any bullshit thrown at us by people who owe a lot of their economic development to the plunder their ancestors committed in our land and people who are ignorant enough to think that we still use elephants to get to work.

And even if we do use elephants to get to work, we create a lot less pollution and keep things clean, unlike those guys who are possibly single handedly responsible for making earth a worse place to live and are bringing us closer to the brink of environment doom. Call it the brown man's burden, but today not only do we have to work to reach the level of development reached by the G-7 or something but we have to do it in a clean and green way coz the white man messed things up. (Ok, i think this is way too much criticism - i respect my american collegues a lot and dont mean any disrespect - i am sorta echoing the thoughts of Thomas Friedman when he lectured on similar issues at Stanford).

Distracted at Green

2007-06-16T01:08:00.000-07:00

Till i give my neurons enough sleep, I wont be able to write as well as I would like to. But during the finals when I was camping in Green Library, here is something I wrote just as an expression of what I was doing! And also as a needy distraction..

"i realized early in life the importance of indexes. and well i guess so did Albert Einstein when he said - i don't need to know everything, i just need to know where to find it when i need it. And i guess Larry and Sergey did too. and as the sweat drops trickle down my torso from my armpit, even as my hands tremble while typing this having drowned myself in coffee for the past few days, i struggle to come up with the appropriate indexes. but that is the single most important thing - indexes - especially in open book exams"

One of the more comic parts of this quarter's finals was that this - there were just too many papers to read and also part of the exam. So in the finals one brings all papers to the exam room since the exams are open notes and in fact open everything. I sorta tried my best to come up with indexes in those papers, and I thing to a large extent succeeded in doing that well, but there were just so many papers, that in the middle of one exam i lost my answer sheet within the stack of papers/notes. For a second, I was like - ok now i know what exactly to write, but where do I write it! I spend 20 sec laughing and trying to find my answer sheet - it was just too funny to be silent about it!

India's no. 1 engineering college - HACKED!

2007-06-05T03:38:00.001-07:00

No kiddin - and it was so hilarious. I mean thank God it was just hilarious and not offensive. I am talking about what happened to IIT Kanpur's site around noon time (PST) yesterday. Here is the screen dump. No one's to blame really, though I am just sad that they lay it hanging for more than 6 hours, I mean people at Stanford were talking (and laughing) about it till evening! The new content mentioned that IITK was bought by McDonalds for $40 Billion. And that IITK was adjudged world's no. 1 Burger Institute! Obviously someone was really hungry :-) Click on the image above to see the details (and get ready for a hearty laugh).

An evening with Omid Kordestani

2007-06-02T16:13:00.000-07:00

So as the ensemble(which it never really was) of spring quarter turns into a harsh, grating crescendo of the dead week - I find myself writing a blog yet again, perhaps as my own version of the primal scream. One fine May evening, I decided to go to this talk organized by the Persian Students Association at Stanford. So for people who think that Indians and Chinese rule the silicon valley, it would be a rude awakening to find out that the top non-founder posts at Google, AT&T and Cisco are occupied by Iranians. I happen to like the Google guy in particular. Omid Kordestani - Senior Vice President for Worldwide Sales and Field Operations at Google, also named among the TIME top 100 people in the world who shape the way we think. He gave a great talk, and to my mind probably the best talk I have heard at Stanford (which is a big thing because i have heard 'many' people give talks at the Farm) and in fact things he said made me re-think some of my own decisions and would probably act as a clutch I balance on while taking bigger decisions in the near future.

Why do I think Omid was great? Well, for one, he speaks fantastically and stands straight on stage - so many people I see often end up being bananas on stage. Also he appeared to be a pretty grounded person, even after being one of the wealthiest people in Northern California. He is probably one of the more famous Persians around, no wonder that I had to stand in line to get inside the Annenberg Auditorium (there are really not many opportunities when one has to stand in lines here in the US - well at least with my kind of life style).

Now here is what he had to say:

One of the most important reasons for my success was something some of you in the auditorium might be aware of, especially who were not born in the US - the immigrant mentality. Immigrants who come into the US generally tend to have this thirst to succeed, this laser focus and the mindset that there are no boundaries to confine oneself in.
Also, it is important for one to have a sense of community and what it can do for you.
In trying to decide which company to work for, try to go to an organization where you are building things
Dedicate yourself
When building a company - only A grade people hire A/A+ grade people, B grade people hire C or below
We (his company) is based on a pipeline of innovation. Why? Because economies change, markets change - so dont put all your eggs i one basket.
Listen to your gut
Career is not one right decision after next. But once you think you are at the right place, focus and put a huge drive behind what you are doing

I liked a story that he told in the beginning of how he ended up where he did. He said that when his father passed at the age of 14, he and his family shifted to the US (San Jose). Being an Iranian you have two choices for your career - doctor or engineer, he said. At San Jose State Univ he did well as a EE major but toward the end of his BS there a college recruiter told him that Omid have you ever thought about sales rather than engineering. Omid said that he was a good engineer but he was really not the engineering types, he was this extrovert kinda person who loved talking about things with people. So even though he didnt like the idea initially of sales, he decided to visit HP and he felt in his gut that that as a right place for him. He spent 5 years there in sales, but he figured out that he was missing something - he needed that MBA to be a good sales guy. Again, he said to himself, it was to be Stanford GSB or no MBA. Back in 1989, he used to get stares from people in downtown San Francisco where he went about refining his Statement of Purpose on his new laptop (imagine a laptop in 89!). And the rest is history..!

Corporate India vs Government of India

2007-05-31T23:29:00.000-07:00

If you have read a few of my previous posts, you might recall that this quarter I actually embarked on a rather adventurous (and according to some desis both within Stanford and without) a rather heretical journey of trying to understand the organized retail sector in India. Both me and Rahil Kacheria (Stanford '08) have been working our asses off these past few days with Tom to get the final draft of the paper ready in time. This paper will be featured on the Stanford Technology Ventures Program website and will be available for download to anyone and everyone. We have read a lot of documents and reports released by management consultancy firms, both big and small, to get a feel for things and try to understand not only the what and how of things, but as Tom says, the "Why" as well. Because the fact that a kirana store waala Chotu will come to your house, open your bridge, stack the Rasna bottles in the right place and leave saying "bhaiya aapke khaate mein likh deinge" (dude am gonna add this on your tab at the store) - is just not comprehensible to people in the US!

But some interesting things happened along the way of coming up with this report. One of those I am going to share with you in this post. So since Mukesh and his Reliance Retail Ltd. are making a huge foray into the organized retail sector, we thought it only appropriate to do a case study on them. For any case study, you need data. And unfortunately for us, RRL does not have any publicly available data that we could make use of in our study. So I tried LinkedIn! (btw, if you are not on LinkedIn - now would be a good time to get on it). A few people in my network, I saw, were in the networks of the VPs at Reliance Retail. I did get my friends' references, but in a space of a few days I realized that I was on a fool's errand. Nothing came off it. So the next thing was to go to the website and go to the basics - call the receptionist at Reliance Corporate HQ in Mumbai. (Btw, I have this knack, i think (:P), of scaling up from the receptionist to the President of the company!) And so in a sweet voice and with a little bit of accent I spoke to the receptionist who directed me to another reception - this was the RRL reception. Again, I introduced myself there and got the receptionist to somehow understand that I wanted data on a study and not a job! Nonetheless i had to talk to the HR dept. as that was the max the receptionist could do for me.

The HR person was helpful, she went out of her way to get the number of a VP who she thought might be able to help me. With the number, i called up the VP. I did get him, and again I introduced myself and told him about the study, but he interrupted me telling me that he was the wrong person to talk to. He then gave me someone Else's cell number. This time, he had hit the hammer bang on the nail - Vice President, Corporate Communications! Finally, I had my man. I gave him a ring, and he was, to my delight, reasonably forth coming in his tone and attitude towards my description. He told me to email him the details that i required and he would get back to me same time the next day.

This was 3 weeks ago. Not only did he not get back to me the next day, he decided to forget about me, until I sent him a third email saying that we were running out of time. He responded immediately saying that he would have the data in a few hours. 2 weeks from that, I am without any shred of data from RRL.

I also needed data from the government, regarding some policy documents pertaining to the 51% FDI in retail, a few tax laws, and as such anything which could help me. Awantika was kind enough to put me in touch with a gentleman working in North Block. I spoke to him on the phone and in detail explained my study and its scope. He also asked me to send him an email. I did and after 4 days, I received more than i could have asked for. Not only did he give me what I wanted, being an economist by training the gentleman went out of his way to send me data which I should have asked for, but for my lack of background in economics couldn't get around to requesting them. He didnt stop there, he told me that he would be sending some documents via post as they are only available in hard copy format.

Government of India 1
Corporate India 0

My study now has a case study on Pantaloon, which, now that i think about it, looks more poised to soar the retail skies in India than others in the race. May be because they have retail formats which cater to a wide spectrum of the society, unlike the others. Anyways, that was that. Here is a video clip I saw on CNN-IBN which has a really interesting new format of retail coming up. This sure as hell is an innovative strategy. If you cannot view it here, go here.

And what is ironic is that the channel ran this story on the same day as the above story, man if India is not a land of irony then I dont know what it..here is the video.

The below average student and Prof. Dweck

2007-05-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

There is a professor at Stanford, a psych professor - Carol Dweck. I think she is smart, not because I attend her classes but because the Stanford Daily (the campus newspaper) says so. And her opinions based on her research surely are enlightening. So here I want to share with you some of what she said in an interview to the Stanford Daily - "Everyone was at the top of their high school, probably feeling smart. Many Stanford students dont feel smart anymore. I want them to know that this experience is widely shared. Almost nobody coasts by and does well...Everyone puts in a lot more effort than you think or than they show...The important thing in your time here is to find something you love and work at it as hard as you can." I think this is possibly the best advice one could get while at Stanford. This place has so much to offer, so many smart people that if you started to fathom it all - you would dig a very deep abyss for yourself and later find it very difficult to crawl out.

I mean I was not necessarily smart - I mean I didnt think of myself as smart when I came to Stanford. Probably the only time I considered myself smart was in middle school. That myth began to sway during early years of high school, and this sway turned into frantic oscillations as I was graduating high school and finally shattered in me any thought of being a smart guy after I left for Allahabad. So I approached college on a fresh slate, and tried to build the smarts in me. But alas, same results as in high school. I mean one would think I would be near top of the class for having made it to Stanford - but I was just barely in the top 10 - in fact there were 9 people in a class of 66 who were head and shoulders ahead of me - but some how I made it to Stanford ( I know - weird huh!). In fact let me digress here and share with you a joke my friends make about me. My friends from my alma mater who are now making big bucks at Microsoft and other big companies happened to see my resume on my Stanford CS Dept website and saw an unusually high GPA listed there (this was only after first quarter - i took only 2 courses). So one guy says to the other -"Thank God we didnt end up going to this university - it seems their bar is very low!" - HAHAHA :)) But running after grades in college really left me with no time to atleast try to find what i really want to do or would love to do. So now while at Stanford I am trying hard to see what I would love to do with my life. But this comes with a cost - grades!

I guess that is my approach to education here - I am trying hard to understand what they teach in class, try to experiment with stuff outside of course-curriculum. But sometimes it doesnt pay off and you find yourself staring down that grade which is also how you would call a flying insect which makes honey! Anyways, I am trying to follow the advice of Prof. Dweck - find that one thing I really love and go after that with all my might. Sometimes its discouraging to see a dismal standing in class, but at the end of the day - I try to keep my conscience clear and be true to the task - and if it does yield returns - well too bad, tomorrow is a brand new day! And at the very least, a below average student is better than a below average human being!

Being an Indian grad student on campus, one of the things which is oft discussed in boring conversations is - "So dood what is ur GPI?" or "Where are you interning?" or "How much are they paying you?". I mean not that often, but desis cant help but bother about such things. I bet if you ask people "Are you doing what you love?" - the answer would be difficult to produce (not in all cases though). Viewing graduate education only from the angle of GPA is being myopic. Well at least this is what I feel anyway. What do you feel? Have you already found what you love?

A Piss for a Piss, an arrest warrant for a Kiss

2007-05-22T01:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, welcome to India in the 21st century my friends. Welcome to a country where it is absolutely ok to take a piss anywhere at anytime under the sun, in the rain or on the snow - but when someone kisses a lady in public - we will thank you with an arrest warrant. Welcome to a country where it is ok to worship the temples of Khajuraho but if an arts student make full use of his imagination or a world renowned artist paints naked Goddesses - they get harassed by the police. What the hell is happening? Probably these should be the last things on my mind in the middle of the week approaching the finals, but somehow time and again I feel the freedom that comes from being an Indian and living in India is really slowly being chicken necked by unemployed people who have nothing better to do than to hold the artistic thought hostage to their lack of tolerance and respect for other peoples' views and ideas. This is what will happen when high school dropouts will do the thinking for the country. Anyways, these thoughts sort of came to the overflow point when I read the following piece by Taslima. And makes me sad..
India is a vast country. From the beginning of history, innumerable people ended up in this cul de sac. Some have visited and then left, others have stayed, sending their roots firmly down. India has always warmly embraced every stranger, people of different colours, languages, religions, ethnicity and opinions. The door was ever open to an outsider. With hundreds of languages and cultures, India is unique in its generosity to the stranger. So why is there no place for me?

I’ve never asked for political asylum from India. All I want is to be able to live here. I might breathe in a distant land somewhere, but my heart is in Bengal. So why is my appeal to live here dealt with politically? Some argue that if India were to grant me citizenship, then her relationship with Bangladesh would worsen. As if I were a common criminal wanted back home that India is harbouring! Fact is, Bangladesh doesn’t want me.So if India gives me a home, why should it concern Bangladesh at all? When I stay in Europe and America, does it worsen their relationship with Bangladesh? Instead, I imagine Bangladesh heaving a sigh of relief if India grants me shelter, like going to an aunt after fighting with your mother.

I can’t help recalling those days when authors from the West joined together to save me. They not only put pressure on their own governments but also prevailed on the European Union to save a writer from oblivion. It was thanks to their efforts that governments in the West were compelled to save me from being hanged. Then followed a kind of tug-of-war between various countries. Norway, Sweden, Germany, everyone wanted me to live with them. Granting me residency or even citizenship was a prestige issue for them: it would ensure them fame.

I don’t know who decides whether or not I stay in West Bengal. Some say the government wants to please the Muslims. Some say it’s the intellectuals who’re afraid, or jealous. Did West Bengal ever love me? Yes, she did. Annadasankar Roy, a famous free thinker, once said affectionately that “Bangladesh is Taslima’s mother and West Bengal her aunt”. When I talked of women’s rights, I got a hard kick from Bangladesh and a kiss from West Bengal. Actually it’s not the country which kicks or kisses, but the people. I have noticed that the number of secular and rational people here is far more than in Bangladesh.

And just as I love East Bengal, return again and again at its door even when I’ve been thrown out, just so do I love and return here to West Bengal.

The whole point is - Hey dudes up there in the government and polity, leave us citizens alone and away from your vote bank politics.

Grad Students Notes in Black and White

2007-05-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the latest master piece from the master lensman, Rahul Thathoo, of the Department of Computer Science - any correct guesses of the course during which these notes were taken will be rewarded with a surprise gift!

An interview with Hema Phadke

2007-05-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

HP: Welcome Mr. Rahul Thathoo, nice to have you in our studios!
RT: Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Nice to be here actually.
HP: Just to remind members of our audience who might have just joined us, Rahul is a bright computer science student at Stanford University...
RT: Just wanted to add to that.. (looking at the camera), when Hema ji said bright, she was actually referring to my complexion, which btw is actually pale..so I am a pale computer science student at Stanford.
HP: (ahem ahem)...yes, and today Rahul is here to discuss one of his two master pieces in the field of applied sciences. Rahul recently published findings in the renowned science journal "Birds of the Same Feather Flock Together", which have startled the scientific community - and that is probably the understatement of the century!
RT (laughs): Thanks Hema ji! Well yes, the findings have been quite startling and in fact even though I expected something new, I never knew it would be such a stark contrast to what we humans have always believed to be true.
HP: So lets dive straight into your work, what have you been up Mr. Thatoo
RT: (ahem) Its Mr. Thathoo...so basically my work, for the past 2 months, has been on trying to find exactly those places on a piece of clothing, where a person, who had previously worn that particular outfit, dirtied the clothing by his/her sweat. So, in a nutshell, trying to find out areas on a piece of clothing where people sweat is what i have been upto for a long time now - 2 months to be precise.
HP: Wow, so how did you go about this sort of research?
RT: Well, Hema ji, you have to note that the research community for long has been trying to do this in a way which does not destroy the piece of clothing in the first place. If you go back to the time when all of us were still in kindergarten and were still learning about Heisenberg uncertainty principle - you might remember that our class teacher told us about the fact that you cannot observe a particle without disturbing it! And that was the reason why the research community couldnt measure those spots exactly on a piece of clothing.
HP: And then you came on the scene! Tell us your methodology Mr. Thathu
RT: (ahem) Its Mr. Thathoo...well so I knew there was no way one could deceive the Uncertainity principal - there are somethings in nature you really cannot defy. So I just decided to play Holi!
HP: Holi??
RT: Yes, the wonderful Indian (Hindu) festival of colors, Holi. And boy, did I play Holi or what! I mean I just went on a rampage, throwing people in water, after throwing a ton of color on them. But of course people colored me black and blue, actually more like yellow and green! The bottom line is - I was looking like a "red-Indian" at the end of it all.
HP: So how is that related with you research?
RT: You didnt let me finish..
HP: Oh, I am sorry..please continue Mr. Thattoo..
RT: (ahem ahem) Its Mr. Thathoo...so after the Holi thing, I came back and threw the dirty/colored clothes into my laundry basket. This laundry basket also contained a wonderful shirt which i wear to all my interviews. That shirt cost me a fortune, it was totally white in color, and I actually wore it on a hot day - that was my previous interview with Amazon.com. After the interview, I came home and had to throw the shirt in my laundry basket as I had sweat a lot!
HP: ahaan...and then what did you do sir?
RT: Well the next week, when I was out of clean underwear and on the verge of re-cycling old/dirty ones, I rushed to the Rains Laundry room and did my laundry. After about an hour, when I came back to throw the wet clothes into the dryer, I found - to my horror - the white shirt which i used to wear to all my interview - was no longer white. It was red! It had gullal all over it. But I was keen enough to notice that it was not red everywhere, only at specific places.
HP: ahaan!! So those places where the shirt was white were actually...(RT interrupts!)
RT: Dont even try to steel my thunder...so contrary to what you might have been thinking... the places were there was red on the shirt was actually the places where i had sweat!
HP: But that was what I was also...
RT: Forget it girl...next question please..
HP: So what were your findings?
RT: Well humans have always thought that we sweat at all the odd places, but my experiments revealed that we sweat in our armpits the most! And that is what got me the publication in "Birds of the Same Feather Flock Together" titled - "Detecting Human Sweat Regions on Clothing using Butea monosperma, from the Faboideae/Papilionaceae family". And I am invited to give a keynote address at their upcoming annual conference which is being held at University of NewFoundLand this year.
HP: Wonderful!
RT: Yes and actually to validate my findings, I tried this experiment again, I threw in a wonderful tshirt gifted to me by Prof. Hector Garcia Molina of the InfoLab, at the Computer Science Department here at Stanford (for being the second best joker in the class) with those dirty clothes which got colored in Holi and to the world's amazement and my contentment, the results were re-produced!! The armpit area on the tshirt was red! That is when I decided to finally publish my findings for the benefit of the rest of the world. And immediately, I knew that all the books on this topic would have to be re-written now that I had come up with this finding.
HP: That is just super. So with one stroke you have put India on the world map for bleeding edge research in human-textilo-hyperhidrosis.
RT: (Hehe) Well thanks, you are too kind Hema Ji!
HP: Thank you Mr. Rahaul Thathoo for joining us this week. Stay tuned next week for more exciting breakthroughs in applied sciences!

....
....(camera's go offline)
RT: You bitch, why cant you get my name right, its R A H U L T H A T H O O. Somebody get me the President, I mean the Producer!!

In the papers!

2007-04-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

Hi! Well guess what, yours truly is in the papers again along with 3 of his best pals! And whats more, its all for good reasons!! Check it out here. And if you wanna see a scanned copy, thats available too here. Finally some hard work pays off. I should really thank Pallavee (Dhaundhiyal) of Education Times (Times of India - Delhi) for having interviewed me and preseting a clear cut story about what we guys have been upto. I love the photo that shows up in the story, of course we provided it to her, it was taken around the last days we guys spent at IIIT together from Suchit's camera. Notice the laborer in the background - I think he worked in our mess. Also notice the channa-jor garam waala in the extreme right - well that is India for you - some of the brightest and smartest technocrats and some of the really poor and under-privileged within the same picture frame. It is out duty to bridge this gap, and well even thought we may not be doing anything about that directly (at least right now), even a sensitivity to the issue itself would go a long way.

On a personal front I have not been keeping well, hopefully (inshallah) with the grace of almighty lord and with the help of my friends and family (fuelish people, A/A and mom dad) I should be back into the action soon.

Mira Kamdar at Stanford (Planet India)

2007-04-24T17:43:00.000-07:00

Hi. I am sort of breaking a personal pledge i took sometime back of not writing anything for a few days - a personal reason that I am not willing to share just yet, but anyways, I thought I heard a few ideas which were really new and brilliant and deserved peoples' attention.

Mira Kamdar was at Stanford today. She is the author of the book Planet India. I loved the way she spoke and well frankly, I had no idea of who she was until yesternight when I found out about her talk. She gave the talk in the same room in which ambassador Ronen Sen had given his talk while he was in campus, in the grand Encina Hall of Stanford. So lets cut to the chase and talk about what she actually had to say:

So what she says is that India is this great big test case for all that has to come in the world. She says that with so many diverse groups and as such the inherent nature of the culturally, socially, economically diverse society, India looks like a good tests case. In the sense that given the set of constraints which India and its people live in, the entrepreneurs there come up with so many creative solutions to problems facing everyone in the world, the most out of the box solutions are seen in the Indian landscape. And why is that important? That is important because most of the world is like what India is, not like what Palo Alto is. That is to say, India is a good picture of what the world is and what problems it faces, unlike EU or North America.

Another point that she made was that a lot was hinged on the success of India. A lot was hinged on whether India succeeds in feeding all of its over 1 billion people, succeeds in generating employment for its people. And why is that? The reason is this. Remember the talk about the race between India and China. Well according to Mira (and I concur) there is NO race. China is already a century ahead of us and doing very well and so there is no race - china wins hands down. So there are these nations in Africa which are saying - Hey so whats this whole noise about democracy, why don't we just do what China is doing! India has to succeed in that it has to show the world that the success can be theirs WITH democracy in place.

Well that was all I could soak in, rest of the time I was busy eating the moderately good Indian (desi) food that on offer there. I feel I should attend more of such talks!

On other news: I am doing an independent study on the organized retail sector in India with Rahil Kacheria (Stanford' 08) and Prof. Tom Kosnik. In case you or someone you know are in the retail sector in India, please feel free to get in touch at thathoo@stanford.edu

Trying to get in, even after getting in!

2007-04-02T01:25:00.000-07:00

Actually the title of the blog pretty much sums up what i started to feel in the last legs of the winter quarter here at Stanford. Even after you get into Stanford, it is not smooth sailing. I mean of course its hard, the course workload and the research work are heavy and take their toll, and of course if you are used to Indian food, you get terrified even thinking of the bland food out here, etc etc. But here is the thing, i am not talking about that - so what the hell are you talking about Mr. Thathoo?? I am taking about trying to take courses at Stanford. Every now and then there come along courses which are offered by the very people who invented that field of study, and of course you want in on that, dont you - you greedy grad student!! So you see this email from Terry Winograd himself advertising this course he is offering next quarter along with - are you ready for this - Hasso Plattner and Zia Yusuf. If you dont already know, Hasso founded SAP AG., and Zia is ex-HBS exec. VP of SAP. And of course the "admission" to this course is application based and Mr. Thathoo gets tossed out just liked he did at Rudy's the other day by the bouncers.

Then another email is received - this time talking about an inter-disciplinary course with 2 trips to Switzerland and lots of fun in building a real neat thing - yet again - "No Vacancy". Its sort of amazing the amount of rejection a person has to put up with in life. Especially if you are interviewing for tech companies, and that too on the phone, you know what I am talking about!

Of course then there was this course which Zakir Hussain is taking ( wah Taj waale!), and do i get in?? Of 'course' not - all the seats have already been filled by ABCDs and people who otherwise just want to brag about taking a course with zakir hussain (btw, i fall in that category!)

That is why I went to the Gurdwara in San Jose today, to pray to the almighty as he alone saves, and also to eat delicious food at the langar!

The One where the quarter ends

2007-03-27T03:09:00.000-07:00

So the best time in the quarter is when it ends! And you are basking in the California sun in the spring/summer/winter break! Yeah, welcome to CA baby, its sun-shiny all year round. Weather news apart, its interesting to see how the classes that i took this quarter designed their last class of the quarter in a real fun way! So the three courses I took were (in short), Databases(CS245), Global Entrepreneurial Marketing (MSANDE 271) and Intro to Biomedical Systems Design (BMI211/CS271).

CS245: So Hector has this real kewl idea of having a joke-break in the middle of his classes - just to wake people from going into deep slumber. The class is usually in the afternoon so people cant sometimes help going to sleep. The thing is that one guy has to volunteer to tell a joke, of course its not necessary that one do it, and in that case Hector comes prepared with his own list of poor jokes, but usually some or the other wise guy cracks a very smelly and geeky joke. Anyways, at the end of the quarter, the guy with the best joke gets the Stanford InfoLab Tshirt (pretty much a collectors item as larry and sergey were both part of the InfoLab here - though it was called the DB group then). And yea, yours truly won a Tshirt this quarter. But yet again, I was second best, Hector had 2 prizes, 1st and 2nd. Ushah won the first prize, so I am happy that both prizes stayed in Allahabad! So I am the official comedian of the class, and judging by my grade in that course, I probably was just that - a comedian!

GEM: The last class just blew me over, if you have got access to SCPD, you better watch this class - coz it was by far the most i have laughed in a class here at Stanford. All the teams (about 8 of them) had to come prepared with a 2 minute thing (could be anything from a song, a skit, a youtube video...) to present as a lessons' learnt exercise in class. And by God the teams did a jolly good job of it. Here are a few excerpts:

By Rachel Dyke and her team:

Wallace: Sons of GEM, I am Donna Novitsky.

Young soldier: Can’t be - Donna Novinsky is 7 feet tall.

Wallace: Yes, I've heard. Raises money by the billions, and if VCs were here she'd win them over with only a 2 slide DDART and an economic analysis from her arse. I am Donna Novitsky. And I see a whole army of entrepreneurs here ready to TALC any product. You have come to cross the chasm, and chasm crossers you are. What would you do with the marketing toolkit? Will you market?

Veteran soldier: Market? With only the toolkit? No, we will join the Fortune 500.

Wallace: Aye, market and you may fall into the Chasm. Give up and take your offer. And collecting your pension many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our competitors that they may spend their millions, but they'll never take our market share!!!

Wallace and Soldiers: GEM Forever! (Scotland forever!)

REAL VERSION:

Wallace: Sons of Scotland, I am William Wallace.

Young soldier: William Wallace is 7 feet tall.

Wallace: Yes, I've heard. Kills men by the hundreds, and if he were here he'd consume the English with fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse. I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What would you do without freedom? Will you fight?

Veteran soldier: Fight? Against that? No, we will run; and we will live.

Wallace: Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you'll live -- at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!!!

Wallace and Soldiers: Alba gu bra! (Scotland forever!)

(Probably wont make much sense unless you have taken the course).

Grant and our team did this youtube video(final version differed from this one):

Of course the last presentation the teaching team made was such an inspiration and I totally recommend this class.

BMI211: Amar has always been great and brought good people to speak in his class, but this last lecture he got a former alum of the class to come and speak on CPOE systems from San Francisco, who has his own startup and he gave a really inspiring talk. Left a lasting impression.

So all in all, my take away from the last quarter:

Jokes win TShirts
A successful business is a Tango - it takes 2 - product and product marketing
Speak few words but speak convincingly like you totally believe in it

Back to School - this time Stanford.

2007-03-25T04:58:00.000-07:00

Hey! Finally the finals are over. And phew what a relief! That they were disastrous - is another story. Screw it, this post is mostly a sort of an answer to more than a couple of queries I have been getting over the past couple of weeks since the people who are gonna be at Gates and Packard started sending out admit emails!

Some of the questions are about the fact that people get admissions, not only from stanford, but from other top cs/ee programs around the US as well, and in some cases they also get a tuition waiver and stipend etc, so it sort of makes it difficult for them to decide where they should go. My suggestion - "Forget about every other college/univ if you have an admit for MS in CS at Stanford or for that matter in any other dept". As with nearly every other engineering department in Stanford, the Computer Science Department is arguably the best CS department on the planet and it is right in the middle of silicon valley - in fact stanford and berkeley together fuel the entire silicon valley and are responsible for much of the innovation around here. So if you are involved in high tech/engineering, there is no better place to be at than Stanford. And if you are someone with a slightly entrepreneurial bent of mind, then you better get your ass here, this place has entrepreneurship in its air! (Disclaimer: There are specific areas with CS/EE which are perhaps better at other CS/EE Depts in the US, but overall, nothing beats Stanford)

Another question is that of Research Assistantship at Stanford and also Teaching Assistantship at Stanford. Well if you can code, and also demonstrate that you can code well, then there is a lot of opportunity for an RA in the numerous research groups all over campus. The CS department itself has many positions open and so does the EE department, but if you are also in the mood of phd, then its slightly more easier. But even without that, EE is like the biggest deparment on campus (or so i have heard) and hence has lots of positions. But people get a lot of programming related jobs at SLAC, Medical School, Medical Informatics, Radiology, Genetics Research, Mechanical related research groups, vagayra, vagayra, vagayra...and of course other engineering deparments, etc. You need to convince people that you can do the job and have some past expertise/experience in that field, and you are in! You cannot expect to get an RA if your chief motive is to learn!! Although, what you can get is a chance to do an independent study under a professor here for units that may count toward your degree, in case you want to learn something and again it needs some convincing.

I dont want to be biased here, so for other departments, especially like Mechanical, there also exist a lot of research assistantship opportunities. And people in the MS&E program also manage somehow to convert an independent study into a 25 or 50 % RA over the course of a few quarters. And so is the case with other departments also, but not everyone is assured an RA.

The TAs are actually called CAs here - course assistants. So the thing is that you need to take a course to actually TA for it! But that could change if you are a PhD candidate and not a Masters candidate. Oh, and btw, to CA for a course, you also need to have scored an A- or above to be able to become the CA for it ;)

Another thing on RAs is that the only thing that determines that you get an RA in the first quarter is - are you ready for this - luck! Believe it or not, the only thing that will get you an RA right in the first quarter is basically keeping your eyes and ears open. And of course persistence. Here are a few reponses i got when i was looking for an RA. People who are nice try to help out but then its not that simple. But most of the guys(CS and EE) have an RA by the second quarter and the rest by the third quarter. It may also happen that you get an RA for a few quarters and then have to look for another the rest of the quarters. I forgot to mention above that, just like the more than one tax slabs that we have in India, there are more than one kind of RAs - 2 to be exact - a 50% RA (which covers 100% tuition and pays really good stipend! - 20hrs per week) and the 25% RA(which covers 50% tuition and pays 0.5 times really good stipend - 10 hrs per week). God only know why they call them 50% and 25%, am sure some guy missed a multiplication or a decimal point somewhere!

Campus jobs - so till the time one doesnt get an RA, they can work at other places on campus - these are jobs which pay by the hour (in the range from 13-25 $ per hour) and are good for pocket money - and there is not dearth of such jobs on campus. These jobs range from everything from administrative (think clerk) to jobs in the lib, to programming jobs on short term, etc. In fact there are lists that people should join in case they are not already on it regardless of their dept - ee-jobs@lists.stanford.edu,
recruiting@lists.stanford.edu,
wics_jobs@lists.stanford.edu (dunno if this works)
soccerforfun (this one is if you like soccer - not for a job)

You need to send an email to majordomo@lists.Stanford.EDU with the body - 'subscribe recruting' if you wanna subscribe to recruiting list, without the single quotes.

Monthy expenses?? Well good question, really depends on the person as such. But here is a brief financial analysis:

Housing+Medical Insurance = $600 - $900 per month (depends on where you live and what medical insurance you have - i suggest Cardinal Care as it is comprehensive but expensive, Housing - if you go for a 1room/double occupany - its going to be 200$ cheaper than a 2room/double occupancy, per month)
Food - (going by an average of $15 per day on 3 meals (roughly $5 per meal) you can do that math which amounts to - $450 per month (this can be significantly reduced if you cook yourself - around $200 if you cook yourself)
Groceries - keep aside $150 here per month
Phone calls - with a $10 Reliance Call Card here you can talk for more than 2 hours to your girlfriend in India - so there is hope for those entering a long distance relationship!
Travel - if you are a good boy and study is all that you do - you wont be doing a lot of traveling to San Francisco or even Palo Alto, within stanford the idiotic Marguerite Shuttle is phokat ka $0!
Initial (First Time) Expenses - Microwave($30-50), bike ($50-$300), Laptop ($700-$1300), rest of the things depending on person($anyones guess!)

These figures would really depend on your kind of lifestyle, so keep that in mind. Also, the biggest expense is always gonna be the tuition - $7620 for 10 or less units per quarter, and if you want to have time to breathe, there is no point in taking more units than that in a quarter. But if you wanna be a smarty pants - its over $11k per quarter for over 10 units in engineering.

Books - well unless you really know what you wanna study here its difficult to decide on which books to bring, i did in fact bring books from india to this place, but i ended up not taking those courses and so it was really not worth it. You can also try to get books from people who took that course last year, so you really dont need to bring all books, some can a be brought along. Many books are not that costly on amazon - especially the ones which are 'used and new'. BUT - If you are planning on giving quals, then you might as well bring the whole basta(bag) - as much will fit in your boria-bistar.

Internship paisa - In an internship here you can easily make anywhere from $4k to $8k, average being $5K (this is my guess), per month. So for a 3 month period, you can probably make some good amount of money, if you dont squander all of that on alcohol, clubing, and gambling ;)

More fundas:

Stanford opens so many doors, its sorta a ticket to... well...many thing which wouldnt be possible elsewhere, so if you have an admit here, dont give it up that easily.

Plus the weather! If you have traveled in the DTC buses from Dhaula Kuan to Iffco Chowk in the middle of summer or a packed BMC bus from Majestic to Vijaynagar in April, you know what heat is like. Welcome to Hotel California, where the sun always shines but never too brightly to scorch you. This part of the world has some of the best weather all round the year.
Great companies are near by - so internships and jobs are much easier to come by as compared to going to a college which is not in the middle of so much industrial activity - but dont think its going to be a cake walk, competition is so high that sometimes getting even a single offer could be really really tough.
Indian stores are nearby, in fact I am munching on Haldiram's Khatta Meetha Mix as i write this - damn its getting over fast!
Great pedigree and peers!
Great opportunity to polish those social/extra-curricular skills in terms of classes on dances, singing, playing instruments, playing any game that exists (count cricket out), though with 3 courses and an RA (which is 1.5 courses worth of load) you probably would be lucky to get proper sleep, let alone take that Salsa class with sweet chics in it.

There are probably many more questions that you might want to get answered, I would try my best to answer them on email/blog. Though i may be a bit sluggish in replying, depending how hard i am getting whipped here!

Hope this helped :-)

I only wish if I...

2007-03-19T22:58:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling right...that you wish you had done something in the past which you missed out on because you never paid too much attention to it, or you were too shy, or just didnt have time or may be the stars conspired against you. I am feeling that right now. I know its the finals and I should be studying and deep inside my books and Hector's slides, but somehow I am a bit sad that I missed out on what I did. And that thing is - gaming on the LAN at my Alma mater, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, for short IIITA. I only wish I had gamed and gamed till I dropped. I only wish I had cursed/shouted myself hoarse in that Advanced Programming Lab in CC1. I only wish I knew the moves to ducking and blowing the brains out of my opponent out there on the LAN. I wish I knew that when someone said 'Fire in the hole', there was no fire in no hole.

But I can only wish, for I never did play. And now I regret. Anyways, at least I play Foosball now, big scale down from gaming on the LAN, but oh well...I guess i took the road less traveled.

More about life as a grad student

2007-03-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

Hi Guys, thought that instead of acting as a reporter for events on campus, I was act as a reporter for happenings in my life. So been a really hectic journey this quarter. Its almost over with finals looming over my head. This last part of the quarter is really one big roller coaster. Anyways, kinda funny what happened to me last weekend. And dont take this as a revenge post or me trying to get back at someone - but this guy that I know here - he ditched me 3 times in 2 days - I got up at 9:30 on a Saturday to rendezvous with him (we had to go somewhere) and he was fast asleep till 12. Then, we had to order something from the market, and he never even called me to ask me what I wanted, so I was left without milk and bread - no breakfast for next 3 days :( . Then after promising to show up for a thing we needed to go together - he didnt even have the courtesy to call and cancel - no, his mantra - "Just dont show up and people will understand!" Well for people reading this blog, just a simple word of trying to be punctual, trying to be on time, goes a long way, i mean you dont have to hold the door open for me while we both are exiting Starbucks, but at least dont slam it on my face. I felt like such a fool, you know how that saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice and shame on me!

Anyways, and this week an exact opposite thing happens. Imagine this - you scrap someone (random) with a query on orkut and they actually reply back with details in an email! On further questions, they call you for exact and detailed information. My God I was impressed. Thanks R**m! I mean these little acts of doing a little bit more than what people expect really really do you a lot of good. I mean it might not get you a PhD in Computer Science, but it will make the world a better place. I dont know if I am sounding philosophical, but hey - I really believe this.

In other news, I now blog for the Unofficial Stanford Blog . I posted a blog on Holi last week. Probably wont post for a while, finals are really killing me. And also, my research work has been hectic for sometime. I am building this online tool which will help microarray researchers and clinical researchers. And the whole apache permissions and PHP had given me a tough time, but thank God with some help and lot of hair-pulling I have been able to get somewhere. Even under all this work, I took some time off to watch this movie - Road to Guantanamo. You can catch the trailer here:

Its a real powerful movie, showcasing some really sad events which took place post 9/11.

In other news, Suchit finally made it UC Santa Cruz for his PhD in Computer Science. Alok Parlikar is also coming this way, probably going to CMU (might change to Wisc-Mad). Folks from IIITA are waiting to hear about their admits from Stanford and so am I. All the best guys.

Thomas Friedman and the First Law of Petro-Politics

2007-03-05T00:37:00.000-08:00

So the last week was the Entrepreneurial Week as promoted by the US Congress and also celebrated with fanfare here on campus. But also, we had the prestigious Stanford Environment Conference - Energy Crossroads, 2007. And though the entrepreneurial week kickoff had some really good speakers (I wanna blog about that later), the one guy who blew me off my feet just by his oratory skills and the way he drove his point home was the NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman. I mean the guy is a genius. Fit to be the President of the US, the guy is so sharp and has such a keen intellect. I mean his 1.5 hour long lecture was at no point a boring thing - he kept his audience spell bound at all times. For example he would say - 'please switch off all your cell phones, pages, pace makers, etc'. And the close to 2000 people in the Memorial Auditorium would burst into laughter. But he put forth some fascinating ideas which were like thus (the draft is kinda rough as I am mostly reproducing my notes which i took while listening to his lecture):

1. Projecting America in a green way could be a way to re-unite the nation in a new way.

2. Jobs, Temperature and Terrorism are the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century - but cannot be addressed by an America divided in red, blue and green states.

3. After ww2 Eisenhower used the threat of communism to build the highway system - to move weapons - lead to atrophy of railway system - US became addicted to cars - i(Friedman) am not here to propose radically altering our car culture - but we do need to fuel our future in a clean way - the next president has to unite us on clean energy.

4. We (the US) is funding both sides of the war - buying oil from Saudi Arabia and thus funding the 15 out of the 19 people responsible for 9/11 (who were from Saudi). Suggested reading - "The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright.

5. The First Law of Petro-Politics: The price of oil and the freedom operate conversely - as the price goes up pace freedom goes down, if oil is at $30 per barrel people in states like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Angola, Nigeria will demand and get more freedom, but when it is close to $70, less freedom in the countries.

6. The US army was a critical instrument for civil rights in this country - if the army goes green - it could be a hugely important institution for making green the new red, white and blue.

7. If China keeps growing at 8% a year, it will have the same per capita as us in 2021, will have a per day consumption of oil equal to 99 million barrels, while the world today produces only 84 million barrels.

8. You cannot tell China and India that we have gone dirty, you go green. In fact China and India already warned us.

9. This year(2006), what shocked me, daffodils in my drive way in Washington DC in January, first time in living memory, Moscow had a Christmas without snow, UK had the highest temperature since it started recording its weather in 1600s.

10.The good news is that people are alive to the problem - we have to avoid going past the doubling of the CO2 level in atmosphere as compared to the eve of the industrial revolution. Here is our challenge - if we do nothing - we will go past doubling in year 2056 - to avoid going past that doubling - and help India china and Brazil - for us to do that will require the biggest industrial project in the history of mankind.

11. 26 trillion watts of energy are required by then, we generate 13 trillion - if we wanna continue to grow from 13 to 26 in a clean green way - we will basically have to generate the rest of the 13 tri from green means - if we do it from nuclear power - we need to build 13000 nuclear reactors - that is like little over 1 a day for the next 30 years.

12. the only thing that can drive tech innovation at that scale is Wall street - challenge is to get green power down to the china price - if we dont have clearn green power scalable to prices in china, India and Brazil - we would be worse off - the real math problem is how do we get these clean green techs down to the China or India price

13. We want to own the technology - but we want to do it at their price - to scale at the china price - unfortunately we dont have an energy policy in this country but energy politics.

14. How nuts is it to invest in ethanol - God bless California - because of the regulations of this state - per capita use of electricity has been flat for the last 30 years - what CA is doing should be should be federal regulation.

15. Who can name the latest energy innovation in this country - dont bother - nuclear power - 1955 - Germany is buying all the silicon - they dont even have Sun out here in Germany - I was in Texas - we have the Saudi Arabia of wind between here in texas and North Dakota - but he had to go to 10 diff regulatory utility companies.

16. Toshiba makes the nuclear plants in Japan - they hv a 40 yr plan - do u know a company in the US with a 1 yr plan.

17. Where is the million person march for green energy - did i miss that - most social reform movements in history - start as protest movements - build a coalition and show that to the government - so i am where i began - the good news - green is the new red white and blue - but are we fooling ourselves?

Holi at Stanford - Desi Ishtyle

2007-03-04T20:07:00.000-08:00

Holi, the very popular annual Hindu Spring festival was celebrated at Manzanita Park this last Saturday with lots of colors, water and some mud as well! Holi marks the onset of spring in India. So why is Holi celebrated?? Well there are various stories in ancient Hindu texts but the three most important reasons can be found here.

But on campus the Hindu Students Council had really done a good job of guaranteeing a good party sans alcohol! People smeared each other with colored powders (gulal) and threw water on each other. Of course as the party progressed, puddles formed on the ground, much to the enjoyment of everyone. In fact the moment I entered the park, a gang of 5 caught hold of me and dragged me into the mud and smeared it all over me! That was my initiation into the Holi celebrations. People then started sliding in the mud which by then had become so slippery - it was difficult to even walk without slipping. The desi music was loud and the DJ was good, people danced to popular Holi numbers like "O Rang Barse" and various others. It was nice to see people from various countries and faiths participate with equal zest. But one thing that was missing was Bhaang (Cannabis sativa)! This is a herb which causes people to laugh a lot! Believe me, drink a litre of it and you wont stop laughing till the evening. In India, Bhaag is mixed with milk and served as something called 'thandai'. Last year on Holi (I was in India then), i just couldnt stop consuming it and I was out for 2 days, in fact I went beyond laughing, I was so high - I couldnt come down for the next two days. And unlike, alcohol, the high of bhaang is sticky, no coffee, no cold shower will ever help you!

Back to the Holi on campus - so after people were done with the Holi on Manzanita Park, it was time to wash themselves - and Stanford with its many fountains provided the perfect second round. A few good men (and women) who remained after the official party, then walked over to the Red Hoop fountain! Everyone jumped in and tried to create a whirlpool inside it. Next on the cards was the Claw Fountain - again - whirlpool. After this we all walked down to the Tanner Fountain in front of the Hoover Tower. On the way, we met a bunch of tourists looking at us semi-clad, almost cavemen like people strutting down white plaza. To one of the bewildered souls I said - "Welcome to Stanford!".

So, colors, water, mud, fountain hopping were what Holi 2007 was all about at Stanford. If you think you missed one helluva party, there is another Holi going to take place on the 25th here on campus. That is going to be a bigger party!

You are not going to believe this!

2007-02-19T14:44:00.000-08:00

So its an ordinary February morning in Northern California. I decided that I had had enough of junk food it was time for some Kashmiri food. So I was heading to my maasi's place in San Jose. After only 4.5 hours of sleep I got up to get ready and catch the 10:02 South Bound to San Jose. I reached the California Avenue CalTrain station about 15 minutes before the train time and there was no one on the station except this guy i saw as i was turning the corner into the ticket vending machine area. And as I got near, i realized my dream had suddenly turned into reality - I was marooned on the platform with none other than my main man - the great Donald Knuth

The first thing that struck me was that this guy was tall - man he was really tall! And he was wearing this black overcoat looking more like a CIA agent than a computer scientist! He asked me the time. I was like Oh My God - the Great Don himself is asking me for the time - it was 10 minutes to 10. "There are still 30 minutes for the train", assuming that even i was heading North toward San Francisco where he was going. "Oh my train is gonna be here in 10 minutes, I am going to San Jose". "Oh..!", he said. Anyways, he had a small folder with him and sat down
on a bench at the platform. The sun was bright without a cloud in sky - the typical sunny California weather. Now, I didn't feel like bothering him as he had opened a set of papers and was going about his business of being a computer scientist - even on the bench - but I still had to talk him. I couldn't give up this once in a lifetime opportunity.

So I walked up to the bench, and started - "So Don, can I ask you something? Why did you give up email so early on?". I know it was dumb questions given he has the answer on his website but still i needed a pick-up line! "Oh i have it on my web page, and the thing is that I couldn't even get started with work before 1pm as I was so busy answering people's email - and so i decided to give it up. Plus I had used 15-19 nears of email and that i thought was enough for a life time. Plus sometimes people would send me problems who's solutions they would expect and if i couldn't come up with one they liked, I would have to hear lots of unpleasant words". Me said - "So how much money did you end up giving as part of your books claim of giving money to people who pointed out errors in your book?" - Another dumb question I think - "Oh I think i have given out around 25K dollars as rewards! But people are nice and then don't en cash the checks, I just filed my income tax returns but i saw that none of the people had en cashed the checks - I saw to them - take a xerox of the check and keep that and en cash the original". Another question - "So how did you get started on La TeX? I mean we have a rumor going on in India at least in my school that you had a graduate student who had problems and in order to solve those problems you guys ended up creating LaTeX". "Well", he said, "that is not true about TeX( i felt like a fool calling it LaTeX!), the thing was that i wrote books and the publishers at that time printed them out in such a manner that made me cry! So decided to do something about it - and then I had a graduate student who was very smart - but you know the thing is that PhD is kinda weird a degree - in the sense that its not like BS or MS that you dont have exam to pass to get the degree - so therefore, a good student is not necessarily a good PhD student, and a good PhD student is not necessarily a good BS/MS student. Like my father, a wonderful man God Bless him, could never be a good PhD, but he was an excellent student. So I told this student of mine to try a couple of problems as warm up problems and see where it goes. And so he worked on it a bit. Plus I in a class that I was taking at that time - we were working on how some tools we used could help music researchers in their work - the thing with music is that their notes, when written on paper, cannot be half on one life and half on the other - and someone pointed out in class, we can use a similar structure for text formatting as well!".

In the middle of the conversation, Don asked me where i was from and what my background was. He wrote my name on his paper in his folder!!! That was exciting! He told me he had heard about the trouble in Kashmir. He knew a bit of Bengali - he said. I asked him where he was going in SFO, he said there was an invitation from some Stanford Society and then there was an Opera Premier that he really wanted to go to! And he showed me his tickets for that too. Then I told him what Jeff Ullman had mentioned to us in his Data Mining class - "In Computer Science, these days, you don't need to solve an NP hard problem to make money, all you need to do is make a video uploading site, what us your take on that? - Too bad my train just pulled into the Cal Ave station - and I had to leave - but without a smile - Don said - "He is a pragmatist! Goodbye" in the same breath!

Never in my life have I wished the train to be late as last Saturday. And thank God it was late that day by 7-8 minutes.

Mighty Indians

2007-02-17T02:57:00.000-08:00

So lots of things happened in the last few days but before some important announcements, I thought I would address another issue first. Two things happened which sort of increased the priority of this post prior to some other posts just waiting to be published. One took place in the Global Entrepreneurial Marketing (GEM) class that I am taking and the other took place while reading Gaurav's (my ex-boss!) blog which had an article from Forbes bullshitting India.

Tom Kosnik, who by the way i just admire - part of the faculty team for GEM, posed a question in class - "Name a few companies you would want to work for?" - Of course everyone named companies like:

McKinsey
Google
Apple
Microsoft
a few startups
IDEO
Sequoia Capital
Benchmark
IBM Research
Kleiner Perkins
Meebo

And then I heard two names - Infosys Consulting and Biocon. Ok - it was me who said Infosys consulting - but man the moment I heard Biocon from someone who was not an Indian and probably never lived in India - i couldnt believe my ears. I mean this is a really really sought after class and that too in Stanford - a class of 86 people - some of them - the smartest people on the planet - and they want to work in Biocon! Man this is just fantastic. Anyways, thought I would tell all you guys out there that we are really building companies which people want to work in - not just people living in India - but people across the globe - has mighty India arrived?

About Gaurav's blog and the Forbes article, well, the thing that someone took time out to bullshit us, well that in itself sorta says something! I think the comment on Gaurav's blog rebutting the arguments was really cool. I somehow agree with the view that complacency is really not requrired, we need ever more Ratan Tatas, Narayan Murthys, Kiran Majumdar Shaws et al - and need to do something about the living standards, the infrastructure, but we are getting there - and the point about solving all those problems first and then going forward with rest of the things is at best an idiotic thought. The article sort of smack of a veritable rebuke if anything, the author had facts to back it - but i did not see any reason to use language which would come off as offensive to people like me and you(perhaps). Khair, take home message I think is that it (the article) was a good reality check - and we need to keep reminding ourselves not to slow down - as the sang in Lagaan - "chale chalo chale chalo!"

ABCDs and Racism

2007-02-04T04:03:00.000-08:00

So me and my friend Gaurav were discussing the other day - why ABCD girls will not allow Indian men near them. I mean its as if they have this preconceived notion that we will smell like curry or something. And this is a fact - ABCD girl come off as the most racist of anyone, i meant i guess they are the only racist gang on campus - no one else will behave the way they do. And take my word for it - I am yet to find an ABCD who does not conform to this fact. Anyways, to hell with them and their preconceived notions and idiotic stereotypes about us - call us FOBs if you may - but bottom line - I am not impressed.

Then on the other hand I think - I may well be that frustrated grad student on campus!! Trust me I am not - but something is surely amiss here.

Which brings me to another related topic - why are the American born kids of Indian parents called ACBD - i think i know coz i was something close to that - born in India but grew up outside for a significant portion of the time. The reason is that when they are out of their homes the culture around their American friends is really different from what they are taught in their homes by their parents - parents born and brought up in India. So, its really not their fault. And probably unfair to call them ABCD, its really not their fault.

BTW - for the uninitiated - ABCD = American Born Confused Desi

Ambassador Ronen Sen

2007-02-01T23:31:00.000-08:00

Yup, met the man himself today. He is on the west coast for some business, and he paid a visit to the farm. He met President Hennessy prior to his talk at the Encina Hall. I had an interview( about which I am going to blog next) so I could not attend his talk. But since I had to meet the topmost diplomat of the Great Republic of India - the Indian Ambassador to United States - I literally rode my bike like a horse and reached just in time for the last 2 questions - he was done with his talk - was just taking audience questions. I loved the way he answered a question on Hindu extremism in India:

Q: So Ambassador, are you people in India worried about Hindu extremism?

A: Yes! Yes - period! So the I was taking to someone yesterday and i told them what makes us Indian - its not a piece of territory - its not our flag, its not even out national anthem - its our tolerance and respect for diversity, diversity in religion, races, cultures, languages, even culinary diversity! We are not just tolerant, but are respectful of someone else's cultures and beliefs. India was a civilization first, then a nation, then a state.......and he continued......

Anyways, so I went up to him and he was really very approachable - even though he was surrounded by the top ranking government people. So I said to him - sir i am rahul thathoo and i belong to Kashmir. Now a while back there was a talk on campus about how India and its alliance with Israel was a terrible thing. Sir, what do people think that Muslims of the valley are the only sufferers, what doesn't India make it a point to highlight the pain and suffering of the Kashmiri Hindus. I mean we are refugees in our own country - and what is the government doing for us. People think that there are only Kashmiri Muslims who are the sufferers, I mean who will think of us. Just because we are fewer than them doesn't mean that we would be thrown to the dustbin.

His answer was more of a soothing reply - I know what you are taking about and I feel your pain, believe me I have visited those parts of Kashmir. And I know the exodus was so fast and you guys were really made to leave faster than what happened to people in the Balkans. But we are doing ....... someone else interrupted him then.....leaving much to be said (and done!).

We ended on a good note, he shook hands with me and my roommate who was also there, and gave his business card to both of us and left in his luxury (small) limo.

Hopefully he will remember the Kashmiri Pandit plight and will let the international community know about us and our plight.

Catch the movie on the weekend Mr. Grad Student!

2007-01-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

Hey!
Well i realized an important thing that happened this last weekend. I decided against logic that I would go watch this movie - "Little Miss Sunshine" at the Memorial Auditorium on campus. And a couple of good things happened - but before that - why was going to the movie against logic? Well big story short - so much work, so little time - and why waste time on movie - catch some sleep instead! But I went anyway - and guess what happened - I met this nice person who works for Oracle...why is that important? Well coz i might be interning at Oracle and I might need to build a network there to get around - and also it helps to know people in the industry - and various other reasons - knowing people in the right place can be a real help. The other thing was that the movie was a good opportunity to provide myself a good distraction from the monotony that usually sets in when the quarter starts.

Another thing that I learnt all thanks to Leor was - how to start to build that network. So at the end of the movie i did not know how to politely ask her for her email so that I would know how to get in touch with her after tonight - so she very generously offered her business card to me and I was like - shit why didnt i ask her for that. So lesson - to build that network - ask politely for that business card - not "what is ur email address?".

Anyways, man that monotony has set in and am dead tired - its only Tuesday...:-)

Letter to Editor

2007-01-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

Would you believe it, they published my letter to the editor in the Hindustan Times - that too Delhi Edition! On Sunday, 21st Jan, i read this wonderful arctile written by Neelesh Misra and Soma Wadha that India is really Shining. How the people in the villages now shop at shopping malls. And how the mobile phone has become a status symbol now even in the villages! And I couldnt help replying to both of them. And then they published it in the edit page. I was like...oh my God! Anyways, here is the part of the article by Neelesh:

http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/artMailDisp.aspx?article=21_01_2007_013_002&typ=1&pub=47

And here is my detailed email:

Hi Neelesh.

Rahul Thathoo here, I am a Masters student in Computer Science at Stanford University. And even though I am the stereotypical Indian techie out here in the Silicon Valley, when, in our friends circles, we talk about the new India, the India in 2050, we see that India riding a wave of rural going global, the rural class breaking clear of the shackles of their "dehati" lifestyle - owing mostly to the agricultural economy doing better. IT and other knowledge based industries of course would help enable all that, but in the end it is the people in India's villages which have to see the benefits and that will come with them being able to have disposal income to do what the urban class has since long done, and for that - better retail channels, better infrastructure are extremely important.

Your article really makes one's heart fill up with joy and delight. I want my India to shine, I want my India to be that where the head is held high and the mind is without fear. And out leaders and business are also doing a good job of that - Azim Premji on campus did a marvelous job of letting people know that India has arrived - people mostly are caught up in the "China is happening" scene...he delivered an excellent lecture on how he went from selling vegetable oil to becoming one of the biggest IT companies of the world. And ditto with P. Chidambaram - when he was on campus.

Everytime one of my friends goes to India for vacation and comes back, he/she are really mesmerized by the fact that things move so fast in India and the difference is so noticeable - changes(all for the better) are really happening and now so many people want to move back to India, at least as compared to previously. I arrived here just 4 months back, ...blah blah (classified stuff)...all working to make products for the India market - why?? Because now every month the internet penetration is increasing so rapidly - we want to be the first on the block. Such a huge market to just go out there and conquer!

Anyways, these were my views, kindled by your article! Once again, good job Neelesh/Soma - would like to read more from you!

Cheers!
Rahul

And they published a smaller version here:

http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/artMailDisp.aspx?article=24_01_2007_010_016&typ=1&pub=47

Thanks Vir Sanghvi :-)

Welcome to Stanford!

2007-01-20T17:29:00.000-08:00

So when a friend of mine wrote a blog on the kind of replies he had received to the emails he sent out applying for Research Assistantship in Stanford, I decided I would follow suit. In fact I decided to go a step further, write a couple of descriptions of the one on one interviews I had with some of the professors at Stanford, before I got my RAship. Here it is:

Thanks for your interest. I am curently on sabbatical in Singapore (until the end of 2007) and right now I am in Nepal on a climbing expedition. I will behappy to meetyou when I return to Stanford if you are still interested.

Thanks for your e-mail; I have already hired an RA for this year, so I don't have any other positions, unfortunately. Sorry. - "He gave me an RA in less than 2 months from this email"

Thank you for sending the information. Unfortunately, my computer is unable to open rar files, but I did look at your resume.

You certainly have had some experience in computational biology, but it wasn't clear whether you've had experience in machine learning or statistical methods. In any case, I have a fairly strict policy not to take students into my group until they have successfully completed at least one directly relevant course here at Stanford. Ideally, this would be my cs228 course (probabilistic graphical models - winter), but I may also accept cs229 (machine learning - fall), or my new cs279 course (biological networks - fall). I know you are not currently enrolled in cs279. Are you taking cs229 by any chance? If not, then I can only suggest that you take cs228 in winter, and then come and talk to me partway through the quarter about possible research opportunities in my group.

The TA-ship in Hindi is an unpaid position. You get school credit for taking Directed Reading in the SLP. It essentially involves doing HW correction, and the Hindi is quite basic. Usually, the terms don't work out for Masters students since they don't get paid, or get units. If you are still interested, you can email me and we can meet. Also, if you know anyone who might be interested in getting upto 12 units for the year towards their degree, you can get them to contact me - of course, they must know how to read and write Hindi.

--------------------------------

One on one interaction with this guy in Dept of Communication:

Me: Sir I am from the MS program in the CS dept...
Prof: So???? (Face like freakin Hitler) This is the Communication Dept - i can see that u idiot - I have eyes!
Me: I know that sir, I was here to talk to you about research opportunities in the Facial Recognition of electorial college...
Prof: I have no money for CS Graduate students...(i thought he was about to take out a gun from under the table and shoot at me...)
Me: Thank you sir, and ran away from the building as if my ass was on fire...(This was, btw, my second day at Stanford - quite a welcome huh!)

With this guy in the Computational Mathematics Dept:

Me: Is Prof Darve (read like Kumble) in?
Office Manager: You mean Prof Darve(read like carve)?
Me: Yes
OM: Yes he is in...
I go in...
Me: No he is not there
OM: He must have gone to the toilet...
Me: (To myself): possibly a good omen!
Darve: we were supposed to meet at 3, you are 10 min early...
Me: I have a class at 3:15 sir
Darve: Anyways, come in - we have a project to build a car simulation, using OpenGL and Matlab to solve 2nd order differential equations - I want the students should in this course be able to make a car simulation game which they can race against each other at the end of the quarter - can you build it - I will pay u $13 an hour for it
Me: (To myself): I bet the slaves from Africa got paid better for their work - wtf - differential quations in matlab - with openGL porting - this will take about 6 months at the least - with 3 courses at hand...
Me: (To Darve): Of course sir, this can be done, so i will keep in touch with you, thank you!

BDay!

2007-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Hey! And today in India they are celebrating my birthday! Nice of those guys. And I am missing them. Here still one more day to go. But somehow I feel as if a part of me is missing. I get the feeling that I probably dont like it much here. Although I am getting the best that the US has to offer, I mean life in Northern CA and then life at Stanford and stuff...but seriously...something is missing. I think I miss family back home. But then I used to miss them when I was in Allahabad as well. But this is not that kind of missing, something else! Cant figure it out. This place is good, but its not home period.

How to Get into Stanford For Dummies - Part 2

2007-01-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

So this post coming a long time after I had written the first post about the same topic but for students in 1st and 2nd year of college. Most because I was sucked into the academic system here in the duration of the quarter. But now I thought before the second quarter began, I should finish this up.

Now for me, while I was in college, the third year was easily the most demanding(read toughest) year of college. I had a not so easy 5th semester and a very tough 6th semester followed by an even tougher summer at IISc. And in the middle of the 5th and 6th semester, I had to prepare for the GRE which i ended up giving later than I would have thought - in March - but at least it was earlier than most people. That is one issue one must decide and commit to early on, when and where to give the GRE. The centres are booked tight in Aug/Sept/Nov, so one should ideally do away with the GRE while in the third year, which adds to the commotion for being a junior(junior in the US is a student in the 3rd year of engg). One mus also, at the start of the 3rd year try to look for a good internship. Mostly people I knew went abroad for an internship, I too tried my luck out there but I didnt get a favorable call. But instead I went to the best Database Systems Lab at IISc. Anyways, in the 3rd year grades usually show a down trend, dont be too preturbed by that, it is usually common to all but try to work an extra bit to keep them above a certain respectable level. You might have to give up on a bit of socializing. But whatever you do, dont lose your sense of humor!!

In the best case you should try to get a reco from your summer internship after the 3rd year. So you would have to work on that. In my case, I had an absolute disaster of a summer. Didnt do too well. So of course I didnt even ask for the reco as I knew that would play out against me in my application. That is one important point to keep in mind while approaching profs for recos. Get recos from profs who you know would give you a good reco. Moving on, into the 4th year, try to get a job first thing at the start of the placement season. Get this mental block over with, this would keep you and your folks at home in peace that at least there is a back up. Also, start looking at the universities that have are in the top 50 as far as your specialization is concerned. Pick a couple in the top 10, a couple in the middle and a few as a backup. You also need to start working on you statement of purpose. Ideally you should start with this process by August. Slowly and steadily, work toward finalizing your univesities, start working on your SOP, start writing your reco letters in case you are on good terms with your faculty and they ask you to, else in case your reco giver is far away, then you may want to get their reco beforehand(only for a paper application). For a non-paper application, it doesnt matter that much.

For Stanford, there are a couple of essays that they ask you to fill out, and the character limit is really low. So you really have to leave out the bullshit and stick to the core issues that make you a cut above the rest. Prepare one essay on how your undergrad embedded in you an urge to seek higher education in your field, and the prepare another essay on how you would add to the diversity of the class which you would attend at Stanford. All recos at Stanford are online, so you need to remind your reco givers to fill out those recos in time, especially if they are busy or are not in your undergrad college.

Once you are done with all that by Dec 1, just wait for the great email which should reach you in March, depending on your department. Some stats for this years CS Masters class, the CS dept is not really one of the biggest, but its not small either. This year they took in 130 MS students and around 45 PhD students. There are around 10 Masters students from India and 2 PhD students from India. Out of the 10, 1 is from IIT that too with 1 year work ex, and out of the PhDs, one is from IIT, with a Masters from Georgia Tech and the other is a Masters from IISc - incidently she worked with the same prof I interned with and with his reco she is not a Stanford CS Fellow! Man i should have got his reco!

All the best to you guys! In case of any questions or if there is anything you think I can do for you, let me know.

Teacher

2006-12-29T03:57:00.000-08:00

So there was this funny saying back when I was in school and even in college, "Take as many pangas as you want - but never, never ever mess with a teacher!". People knew that their teachers could take their career apart if they wanted. But somehow more than that, people also respected the good teachers, the teachers who knew what they were talking about. Teachers who encouraged questions in class - who made learning an enjoyable experience not some gut-wrenching judging game - those teachers were really respected. I personally owe everything I am, everything I know to all the teachers who taught me from my first school in Jagdishpur(DPS) to my current school - Stanford. Each and everyone of us has teachers to thank. But somehow we often forget them - we never attempt to get back in touch or pay a visit to them or may be even send a postcard - no we dont even do that. But I read about this touching story and I was really left feeling a pang of guilt - Gosh I wish I had done something for my teachers too. http://in.rediff.com/money/2006/nov/10ab.htmIt talks about how a dying former teacher of IIM Calcutta was helped by his students to try to import a drug from the US which could save him. Though he did not survive, the gesture really touched me. We should all go back from where we come. I feel that often, in the daily rush of life, we forget who we are and where we come from. And often many of us dont know where we are going. Taking time off for going back to the good old days really comes off as time well spent - you dont want your whole life to be just your life - you want your life to have made a difference in other people's lives - something like the lives of teachers! I miss my teachers :(

Live blogging - BASES Entrepreneurship KickOff at Stanford - 30th Oct, 2006

2006-12-29T03:42:00.000-08:00

So a couple of weeks back, the student entrepreneurship club of Stanford(BASES) hosted a panel discussion on the current trends in entrepreneurship here in the valley. The discussion was moderated by Guy Kawasaki and the panel had as it members: Anand of Aerospace Corporation, Seth Godin of Meebo, Ann - big time VC here, Steve - big time VC here Erik And a couple of more people So here is what I could jot down (in a very news-reporter sorta way), I hope you enjoy it and benefit from it. I can also give you the link to the podcast of this - but u need to write comments for this blog first!GUY KAWASAKI A Stanford alum - law school and gsb reject Erik - active in spinning companies out of stan Ann - ... venture partners Steve - Meteor Network Seth on current state of high entrepreneurship people say its easy to get money this day and age...but this is not totally true - and with meeboe - just go do it forget abt business plan competitions dont spend months planning to execute - a lot of stuff is getting started right now meebo launched with a sum total with $6000Guy says: so what wrong with business competitions if u made a plan for meebo there would be a sum total of 50000 people in the world who wold use it if people are super passionate abt it and u think ut would work - as long as it doesnt take millions of dollars its seth's 8th attempt at a startup erik on the same its quite healthy here in the valley understand what ur competitors would be thinking or a project that u would be associated on campsas an entrepreneur - what risks u are takings fantastic time to be in ur seat be thoughtful abt building ur markets Ann - first round of capital - angel/venture is the most difficult round to raise we look for a lot of commitment its rare to see a business plan on 1 page paper the bar is high for that first round Anand hired a sales advisor - look in to the mobile enterprise not the tech behind it - but the fact that what does it do for the user how badly ur customers what ur product comes down to environment when customers are starting to trust the startups again get ur hands dirty with some basic sales, basic marketing techniques, Steve one thing that is different today is that there is a new thought - creating a new focuswe look at a few values - facilitating connection between users - connect to people's passions Seth on Web 2.0 ->next generation of websites - more of connect people less on the site owner and more on the people coming to it Tim O'rielly - Web 2.0� it was 2001 - business was low - worked very well for tim - my business model is open source - u have to be able to describe ur unique competitive model we cant invest in rear view mirrors rather than forward lookin Steve it doesn't mean a lot what ur marketing model whats the market looking like444i - Armando Fox - good course at Stanford Ann - brand advertisers are gonna come - google will need to run a lot of experiments to see how they can get more yahoo doesnt have the advertising dent that Google has� Between MySpace or YouTube - its myspace - which is a no brainer coz the demographics cross section which myspace caters to is huge some luck or some blinding insight - but when u r in the internet - when u r trying to predict the users - doing research is very diff than putting up a consumer internet incremental improvement on what u are already doing - watch videos after download - in youtube - watch in the browser without scrolling the bar - u have to know what is happening on this site from the main page target audience - potential advertisers How many power point slides would u see when u are looking at entrepreneurs doing their pitch - 0 slides 15 slides - if u go higher 20-25 slides u r it eligance and simplicity where u have 30 secs where u have 3 min gonna have to pitch to potential employers that u r gonna hire u r gonna pitch to ...Ann - less than 20 slides Steve - ~ 20

How to Get Into Stanford University For Dummies

2006-12-29T03:19:00.000-08:00

Hi. This is Rahul Thathoo. I am a First year Masters student in the Computer Science Department here at Stanford University. I moved here on campus a couple of weeks back after completing my engineering in India and thought that I should pen down my take on how to get into a foreign university of the stature of Stanford. This is going to be a partwise blog, where I deal with certain issues in one part, and issues specific to the application process in another part and so on.Getting into Stanford is not that difficult as many of you may perseive. After all, they took me in! And if I can get into Stanford, then everyone and their grandmother can too! So let me start off by giving you a bit of my background information. Contrary to what many of you may have already pre-conceived, I did NOT go to IIT. I completed my Bachelors of Technology from the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad.

I cleared the IITJEE in 2002, and my interest at that time were subjects related to computer science and electronics. Since my rank couldnt get me into the IITs in the branch of my choice - I decided that i would go with my heart and ditched the idea of being an IIT-ian so as to be able to study what i really wanted to. This is another important aspect I want to underline here, always do what your heart says - ever heard of the term - 'put your heart and soul into it and you will succeed' - when you put your heart to something, your soul will follow and what you will have at the end of it is Success with a capital S! So if you want to come to Stanford just to get the big brand-name associated with it or just for the weather or the blond chics, I am afraid your application will not move ahead of the admission committee disposal bin. But if you want to come to Stanford to explore broader horizons of application(and research) in your area of interest, if you want to meet people with similar interests and similar zest as yours, and if you want to be something more than 'just another professional' - then it will reflect on your application material and you will be welcomed with open arms (Of course if you are Dhirubhai Ambani's son or Narayan Murthi's daughter then we need a whole new blog to discuss that!).

So the journey toward Stanford beings rather early. "How early?" - you ask. Well in this part I want to tell you what I did in the four years of college in India - which made the admission committee take a deeper look into my application and later, grant me the admission offer. What happens to people in India when they get into college is,after spending some gruelling year in the pressure of Class X boards, coaching for 1-2 years, Class XII boards and then enterance exams, they start telling themselves that after 4-5 years they will be professionals and as such college is gonna be a walk in the park - an excuse to live the good life! Well, the way I look at it is - this is time that actually goes into moulding yourself into what you want to be doing the rest of your life - this is where the action beings. So the manner in which you choose to spend you college days has a lot of bearing with what you are going to be doing after this. The choice is yours. By no means does this mean that total abstinance is required, and that its all work and no play. Well I'll tell you from my experience, in the second year, I spent more time on the football field that working on my class assignments! But I managed time so that I wouldnt have a late submission ever. Well actually, I lied, I did have a few(very few) late submissions, but I guess they didnt take it against me!

So when you enter college, take the first year to explore as much as possible - what your college has to offer - in terms of facilities, faculty, courses, books, projects, etc. Try to meet as many people as possible(especially seniors), but keep touch with only those with whom you think your frequency matches. Be regular with assignments and always work within deadlines. Try to read ahead about the cutting edge in your area so that it will whet you appetite for learning the basics better. Also, try your hand in the extra-curricular activities. First year is a time when you can afford to spend more time than in subsequent years on extra-curricular things, so get your ass moving - go down to the music room to play the guitar(if you dont have yours) - or go audition for the Drama Society membership - or go for the cricket team trials. Do you see my point here - explore all that your college has to offer. In my first year i got involved in the audio and lights jobs at college - we had some very heavy duty BOSE equipment for audio and equally good lights and camera equipment - I got in touch with the senior handling it then and after a few months of apprenticeship, he handed the entire thing over to me - imagine the fun of playing DOOM on a LCD projector with BOSE surround sound inside a 150 capacity auditorium! And yes, I was in the Football team too. By the time you leave college, it shouldnt be like that there was one thing you really wanted to do but you couldnt(of course this is bound to be but try not to have too many of those!).

Go out there, and like Nike says - Just Do it! You gotta be a really good time manager also - that is the thing to keep in mind. Time management is everything. I mentioned reading ahead on the cutting edge in your area of interest - what this also does is that it gives you ideas of what sort of projects you might want to work on later in your higher years. But the main focus still should be on reading your course material and getting good grades. Another issue here is your communication skills.You are in college now, learning in depth about various things. Later in your professional career, you are going to put that knowledge to use - BUT - if you cannot express your views clearly to others - what use is that knowledge! The idea is to start working on those softer skills that you need to build once you are out of college. You ask - "Hey wait a minute here, i have 4 years in college, I can do that anytime!" Well any-time never really comes in college, and believe me sometimes it takes a lot of doing to get to a certain level in improving your communication skills - both written and verbal. Start early, read books other than your course books, learn the meaning of new words. So by the time you leave college, you are one polished person articulately able to express what your thoughts and ideas - believe me the chics love that - well at least some do! After the end of the first year, try to take sometime off and be with your family. You could also try to do an internship but that probably wouldnt count as much after first year as it would after second or third year. This might be your last big holiday in a long time - so spend time at home, go places - visit tourist destinations - do some whacky stuff!In the second year things start getting more complex with the load of your courses increasing and you having to study some core concepts in your area.

Try to master as much as possible of what you are being taught. Try to take up good projects such that they will augument your understanding of the subject. These projects also come in handy when you apply for an internship/practical training outside of your campus. Try to talk to the faculty taking the course in which you are doing the project and try to get him involved. If you get stuck, seek his/her advice. Second year should be when you are concentrating in your courses, doing projects for extra credit or as part of course requirement and try to see what extra-curricular activities you want to remain involved in and which you want to give up. Your extra-curricular interests actually turn into necessary and good distractions from the daily chores of homeworks/assignments/tests. Although you should not over do anything, too much of anything is bad. So again, getting good grades in imperative! Toward the middle of the 4th semester, you should start applying for a possible summer internship at a research institute in India or in an industry. Internship is an important thing if what you want to do is get into a foreign university. You should try to work under a professor at a reputed research institute in India (or even abroad) - this is mostly in IITs, IISc, and other Centres of Excellence. This is because universities here appreciate someone who has taken initiative to work outside of his college on projects outside of his/her degree requirements. Also, if you end up impressing the professor under whom you are working, you can manage to get a very good recommendation from him and this would really put your application few notches ahead of others. So dont wake up one sunny summer morning and find yourself without an internship, apply before time, the professors also have limited places to fill. You could also work in the industry and get a recommendation from your mentor there - but the benefit of working in academia is that you get a chance to publish your research as a jouarnal/conference paper, and once you have a paper, your application carries a lot of weight than most of the other applications. More to come...

I am listed at Blogstreet!

2006-09-12T04:08:00.000-07:00

Train travel and lots more

2006-09-07T00:21:00.000-07:00

Hi Guys.
This blog is really different. In that it has been written on a train. I am writing this blog aboard Dehradun Express(9019A UP). I am on my way to Delhi to catch my flight to Stanford. Nice experience this. Of course it would have been much better had Wi-Fi been enabled on this train. Well India is a far cry from that affair as on present date. Was at Kota the last couple of days. It comes as no surprise that Rajasthan has the highest number of cattle heads in India. The streets of Kota are littred with stray cattle. Driving is next to impossible at speeds over 20kmph. I wished I could catch hold of some and sell them off for a handsome amount. But Ramraj told me that the government had banned selling so that they couldnt be killed for beef or something like that. That brings me to Ramraj. He is my dad's driver. Very sweet fellow. He taught me how to drive, initial lessons mostly and some tricks of the trade. I bade him a final goodbye at the station - will miss him. Hope he is still around when I come back.

The train has stopped in the middle of nowhere. Though we are no where near Hindon, the papers said that the Gujjars there has uprooted the tracks as they were protesting their community not being included in the reserved category class. Oh and they had broken all the signals also in that division. Well this is democrazy for you! We are moving again. This is a relatively low priority train, so lotsa stops ahead!! As I leave for the US, I will most definitely miss the 'apna-pan' of India. Its people. Its smell. Its air, water and sky! I will miss u the most. Anyways, am not very good with good byes.

Also in the news was that this year was the 10th time in 125 years that Rajasthan got surplus rain. It rained 125% already and with still around 20 days to go for the monsoon, looks like Gods were gracious in their offerning to the state this time. However, in some regions like Pali, Barmer, etc it was too much causing a lot of loss to both properties and lives.

Today I added my site to blogstreet.com. Lucky for me I am an Indian coz blogstreet only accepts blogs from Indians! It is a site which aims to become a direcory for blogs. People can rate other peoples' blogs. They comment, write reviews etc. which of course other people can read and find out about. It has it own list of the most influential blogs, most read blogs, etc. A good attempt. Another social networking site on the block is siliconindia.com. A real new concept in that it provides mentorship according to people's needs - registered people can write a Statement of Purpose and be mentored by people pertinent to their interests. For example, students, entrepreneurs and engineers, etc can ask to be mentored in their fields. This is new concept that I found. It also has a lot of news on it home page, quite different than other social networking softwares. Besides this it has a lot of other stuff that common social networking sites dont. But the most intreguing thing that I found was that it has got as its members corporate honchos like IBM VP(India) just to name one. There are other like him. Needs more time devotion. In case you havent checked it out, do create a login and find out more. Think will sign off now! See you in Delhi :-) Ciao

P.S. The above pic is of the Umed Bhavan Palace in Kota

Tenacity

2006-08-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

Its sometimes amazing how we marvel at our little achievements. Sometimes we tend to pat ourselves too much or too early. But we forget that out there in the world people strive harder, under adversities far out-weighing our environment.
I saw a girl studying English on the footpath, trying to make money weighing people, in Kamla Nagar, New Delhi. This was something really inspirational. The girl seemed very smart and I and my friend accompanying gave her some money after getting ourselves weighed. Needless to say I was underweight yet again, but the girl, who read out my weight aloud in english, reminded me of a lot more than that - that even though we may have gone through a lot - our hardship is not more than (may be equal to) what a poor man on the streets has to go through.

Lutyens' Delhi

2006-08-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

Mostly, if you ask me about driving in Delhi/NCR, my answer would be - an absolute misery. But come what may, the drive down Rajpath, or for that matter anywhere in Central Delhi is really refreshing. The roads are international standard and the traffic is smooth(most of the times!). Plus the scenary/landscape is truly breathtaking with the exquisite designs of India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, North/South Blocks, etc. I just love this part of Delhi. May be one day when I am rich and famous - will try to get a bunglow somewhere close to this place. Well even Vasant Vihar will do but nothing like having a bunglow overlooking India Gate - you know what I am talking about dont u!! Will miss Delhi. Though I hate it for its absolutely pathetic climate, but the buildings are good. And its one of the few planned cities in India. Wish there were more.

Back at Allahabad

2006-08-13T05:54:00.000-07:00

It feels so nice to be back in allahabad. This time for recruitment at my undergrad school - IIIT Allahabad. They (iiita)have been such wonderful hosts that one feels amased at contrasting this picture with the one we had as a student. Anyways its always good to be back. The convocation was the other important reason that i had to come back to allahabad. It was great - with all its fan-fare! Prof S.K. Tripathi, Provost and Executive VP of SUNY, Buffalo gave the convocation address. On the stage while receiving the degree from the hands of Mr. F. C. Kohli, founder and former chairman of TCS, he joked asking me whether I was the same person whose photo was on the degree! I said 'yes'! Of course it is me! Coz of the recruitment thing, I am not able to spend much time time with family. I also wished I could go to Chitrakoot like mummy, mama ji and maami, anyways duty calls and as i say - 'Any thing for the company'. Missing my delhi friend/s as well! But IIITA is great. Wished we had come here earlier. Anyways, may be next year Tekriti will. Wont be able to show these guys much of Allahabad.

All day people kept bugging me about the T-shirts I had promised them. Gave one to Praneep, he helped a lot. Anyways, should wrap up now. And I must say, Ashish's has not got a pretty steamy new blog at : http://opera.latestinindia.com

See you in Delhi guys!

what VCs say

2006-08-05T04:41:00.000-07:00

what VCs says:
1. hybrid teams of tech and consumer market people

2.
content that is useful to u

3. get that content to the user

4. complete end to end experience on a single machine

5. teams speak about technology but more important is the business model

more to come!

Update

2006-08-05T03:00:00.000-07:00

Nice in fact very nice idea - KarPool - in fact if this thing takes off the world will surely be a better place to be! Definitely a thing anyone could have thought off, but no one did until these guys. Currently a talk on personalized mobiles and design of a mobile. Pretty Kewl!!

Mobile Monday @ Adobe Noida

2006-08-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

Currenlty at Adobe's India Centre - attending a conference on Mobile bleeding edge technologies. Great!! Feels good to be part of this

crowd, met a couple of good people from around the world. Here is the link:

More later.

Justice for Priyadarshini

2006-07-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

Are we still living in the medieval times. Because that is what it seems to me. How can a person, who is known to have committed a crime as heinous as rape and murder get away scotfree. Even the Hon'ble Judge in this case commented - "Though I know that he is the man who committed the crime, I acquit him, giving him benefit of doubt". I guess this must be the only case in history where the judge has made such a statement. Really whenever I think about the whole incident, I feel shaken, what a country we live in. We had died a thousands deaths since independence, Gandhi ji's India has been raped and murdered a thousands times over. Shame India Shame. Na samjho ge to mitt jaoge - E- Hindustan waalon, Daastan tak na rahegi tum haari dastanon mein. God give her soul peace and bring her cruel murder to justice.

A different Saturday

2006-07-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

Hey you all. So another million dollar sturday comes and goes. So how did i spend this sat. Well not the conventional way, at least not what the people who know me would think I would like to spend the one sat I get in a week. I attended a conference on "Role of Lawyers in the Changing Global Scenario". Well I dont regret that I went. Met so many interesting people, I should rather say 'saw'. This guy from South Africa, Prof. Mason of the University of KwaZulu Natal was a very interesting guy. The conference was held at Indian Law Institute, New Delhi. A premier institute of Law in India. All this courtsy AM. Had a good time and was glad that I got to be part of something so international. There were people from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, US, South Africa, UK, etc. Reminded me of the times I used to attend conferences at IIITA. How we made PPTs. And how rushed we always used to be. May be those days will come back soon.

Am running so low on cash had to take the public transport and leave the car at home. As luck would have it I got a cab at Kapashera. He initially decided to drop me at Moti Bagh Flyover but when i was about to get off I asked him to take me uptil India Gate. From India Gate I decided to walk to the Krishi Bhavan Metro Station(Central Secretariat). So I was backpacking across all of Central Delhi. But as lifts are natural to me, I got sweaty soon and decided to take a ride off someone's two wheeler! Lucky I got one again. All in all it was different baby. Thanks AM for making it possible. And yes, a great talk it was!! Keep it up and hope to see you at bigger and better conferences.

Trade Off

2006-07-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

So I had to forgo a chance at visiting the best monuments of the Pink City Jaipur so that I would be able to go to my cousin sister's baby girl's function. Now I really did want to be able to go to Jaipur but then again sister is sister and Sanika is Sanika. At the end of the day I am glad that i did what i did coz i feel family should come first, not in all cases, but still one should think about the family from a various aspects. For one i rarely meet Meenu Didi and Maneesh Jiju and Sanika. So this was an opportunity to be able to visit them. I wanted to get the raport going with the office guys too...but I made it at 0600 hrs to the office just to see those guys off to Jaipur but then I guess not going is not going. Anyways there are trade offs to everything in this world. DSOI was good. Banu gave me a good tour of the whole campus. Meet pretty interesting people whom I usually dont bump into in such functions.

Anyhow had fun. Lets see tomorrow what happens.

Why I dont blog often

2006-07-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

So often in the night I wanna blog, write about all the things i did since my last post, write about my views, write about how m heart grieves for the people who lost their lives and their loved ones alike in mumbai, how sad that i will be leaving delhi/gurgaon and Tekriti very soon, how dismayed I am coz i am not able to go to Jaipur, how happy I was to be able to go to a disc, how much fun it was to be able to party with friends all night and into early morn...a host of emotions and experiences, but alas at night when i come to my bed and fire up my laptop, there are thousands of other things at hand and when it is finally time I finish my stuff its already too late to write anything legible.
Anyways, so last weekend was great after one very hectic week. So much of partying that I feel I have one less thing on my to-do-before-I-die list. Anyways met couple of nice people like Shoikata Das from Pulsar Knowledge Centre. Nice chap and nice looks. The vanilla flavoured cigar...well I would have perferred a non-flavoured one hehe!! And boy is Le Meridian outta this world or what....one really has to visit the loos...a plasma TV...designer fittings...neon lights...damn good furniture. Coffee at 0445 hrs..u gotta love it.
Anyhow so I am moving along at a brisk pace on my ZEN when suddenly i feel my vehicle tending toward the right side of it own and then I figure out its a bloody puncture. Thankfully I was 100m from a petrol pump and was again underway in less than 10 minutes. I had hardly moved another Kilometre when i noticed the samething again, and this time it was the rear tire. Anyways i had to drive almost 5 KM before I could halt at a proper place. So 2 punctures in a day...not bad eh!
Some how these days i have been bitten by the entrepreneural bug..I keep thinking and searching about it...somehow I wished someone could guide me...well dont we all wish!! Actually working in a startup one gets it...may be its infectious! Well I really dont wanna lose Tekriti...wished I could do some productive work for it frmo Stanford...may be something like business development...but lets see...bhagwan ne chaha to kuch hoga!! Alrite so gotta make a move now..catchya all later...peace out

2006-07-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Hey folks!! So lotsa things been happening since the last time I wrote a blog. Been working on a few things on my laptop. hen my car came from Kota, dad was kind enough to send it though I am practically a beginner but I think I am getting the hang of it..driving I mean :) Met not so good people - the lady at BA are not too good...very doer..then people I thought were different are no different from the bad ones...anyways who am I to pass judgement but yaar SV this is not what i expected...

Anyways, this is what happened on Monday last, had to get a draft made for over 30K. Had to visit ICICI, SBI, HDFC and finally CitiBank to get my things in order. Travelled more than 70Km within Gurgaon in over 40 degrees without A/C (ok sometimes A/C!) to get it and took me till 4:30 in the evening starting from 10 in the morning. Anyways, I guess that is life, but it hurts that one has to do so much for a simple thing. Am too tired though its only 11:15 but still.

The train to Tibet - seems like a good thing. Bought a book today - freakonomics...dunno when I will get the time to read it - lekin khareed to li hai. This sector - 14 market is not a bad one. Tomorrow am off to mamu's place.

Generations

2006-06-07T05:36:00.000-07:00

Cut to 3 days back -

So its just another hot summer morning and I am coming down from South Delhi to Gurgaon to go to office. I was lucky enough to get a ride in a call centre cab, nothing out of the ordinary about the car except after a while of sharp turns at over 40kmph I realized I would be lucky if I reached gurgaon in one piece - the driver was so sleepy I thought he would look in better shape after 6 pegs of vodka. Well anyways i reached gurgaon in a record 25 min from Hauz Khas...tell anyone from Delhi and he will look at you like you were some sort of superman - such times in today's day and age are impossible. Anyways I reached IFFCO Chowk and had to catch another bus for Sukhrali Chowk where Palm Court is located. I got into this DTC bus and immediately took out a Rs. 10 note to get the ticket. The conductor gave me a Rs 4 ticket and I enquired politely - "dont you think it should be the Rs 3 ticket till Sukhrali Chowk". And that was like the last straw - he started to yell at me like I was some kind rapist traveling in the bus - he told me to get out and get into a Rs 3 waala bus - I told him i dont mind Rs 4 tickets I was just enquiring, but he wouldnt hear any of it - he shouted out - 'I am not selling onions and potatoes this is a government bus and u can get ur ass out of here if you want to pay less'. I told him - 'sir I can pay u double the fare why are you getting so upset'. But I couldnt get anything across to him, he was so angry as if I had slapped his wife. But anyways, I made the rest of the journey in pain as I had been humiliated in public by a man who was half as educated as me and half as time for values/manners. When I got down, it hit me all the more. I was very upset. I though its things like this that make u think - to hell with everyone. I told myself that my grandfather surely must have experienced such things, I know for a fact that my father had to experience such things, and now its my turn. I mean where is the progress from one generation to the next. I thought there should be an uplift at each level - but where is it - who went wrong - who didnt do his/her part to the full?? Well I think its better to not look for someone to blame..rather try to be a better human being and not do such things which you wouldnt want people to do to you.

Sunrise at 6

2006-05-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

Well I know one thing about myself and that is - I just love mornings...the gentle, light cold breeze against the backdrop of sweet sound of birds, with the sun not too harsh..juss perfect. In fact summer mornings are even better as the day just keeps on getting hotter and hotter and no relief till its late in the night. I especially like sleeping in a room where one is awaken by the sun in the morning. That is it (the room) has a window in the east. Boy that would be real nice to have!! Dolly didi, when she and Gaurav jiju used to stay in blore - they had such a room - it was one hell of a place!

Cell

2006-04-22T05:04:00.000-07:00

Well one normal night, in a normal final year engg student's life, it hit me, it hit me real bad. How madly and badly I was dependent on my cell fone, as if without it i would suffocate. I came back from the canteen to get a Hutch Recharge card so that I could call up my bro in Delhi and wish him a Happy Birthday. After the call I couldnt see any signal on my cell. I switched if off and then on again, only to get a message - "SIM NOT VALID". I frantically changed the sim into another cell and found that it was working, and tried another sim in my cell, and still the same message - "SIM NOT VALID". It was shell shocked. The cell had not fallen, it hadnt ben accidentally dropped into an aquarium, or anything like that. But still. Anyways, I had to leave for New Delhi the next day for my cousin's marriage and so I took the 12:15 bus to (CL) Civil Lines go dump it at a Nokia Service Centre. But still I was like what the hell is happening. Thank Godness for Suchit letting me keep his cell for the night and much of next day, but without a cell I was a fish without water. I was literally going door to door in the hostel asking people if anyone of them had a spare cell, but no one had one. In the end someone told me that Loki(Lokendra Kaushik from Sirsa, Haryana) had a cell which he was not using. But it had a battery panga. But still i wanted a nokia cell, more reliable, or so i thought. I traded the Motorola set with Mayank's Nokia which was on roaming as Mayank was still using his Bangalore number, God knows for what!! When I came back from Delhi I missed an interview because of the cell-less being that I was, as Mayank took the cell back and left me with a defunct Motorola piece of sh**. I asked Awantika to call up the Nokia SS and they told her that it has gone to LKO for 'big-people' to look at. So it meant i was not getting my cell anytime soon. Today, even after 7 days now, I am without a proper cell...but "Ab to Aadat si hai mujh ko...". I guess people get used to what they get used to...if u have a cell, one gets used to talking much, if not then still one lives, but it is the transition period that creates the troubles.

HRI

2006-04-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

When is in Allahabad, the starting point of great Indian UP East, HRI means the nearest thing to Albert Einstein, Nobel Prizes in Physics, and things in that genre. Anyways, for footballers of IIIT Allahabad, HRI is a place with an awesome outfield, just perfect to play football 8 a-side types!! So yesterday using the contacts of Balwant sir of the Maintenance Cell of IIITA, the 9 of us chugged along to the greens of HRI. The thing is that its damn far off, in Jhunsi, in no man's land. In fact people say that IIITA is in some village, which is a fact, but then HRI is in a no-man's land, there is no one around. Anyways, I started off Left-Back, imagine that, left back, u think I would ever play Back....this is what is called Politics. Anyways, for me it has always been that team comes first. So if the team needed me at the left-back position then I will be at the left-back position. However, I would rather have put Khullar at that position, he has better defence sense. Anyways, in the first have we took 2 goals, one was a penalty from a handball by Suttu. The second was an own-goal from IK. Both goals were a bit disappointing, but there was very little Naman could do, Naman really kept us in the game, with all his acrobat saves. In the mean time I was having a terrible game, with very little support from my skills, which, somehow i found a bit erroded. Arjun, the one HERO of their team, well I started off with a bit of a body game against him, and he kinda got the message. After am illegal push, he said to me - "Thats technically a foul...but the point is how long can you keep this up". Anyways, the game ended with a 0-2 defeat for us, but we were happy with the way we played, at least as compated to the 4-0 route at their hands last time around.

I went to HRI risking missing an interview from a "not-so-bad" company based in Gurgaon. I missed a project meeting as we guys had to wait for Mayank and company to arrive in the auto(we arrived earlier at Kam Dhenu as we were in the HRI Ambulance). I guess its like what people say, one cannot ride on 2 boats simultaneously, if one attempts he is sure to drown. Anyways, lets see if we can have a re-match on Sunday.

The Orthopaedic Surgeon

2006-04-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

Well it just so happened that in the first 5 minutes of the soccer game against MNNIT, Allahabad, I injured my ankle bad. But since the adrenalin was pumping, I could continue with the game till the end of the half. But when it was over, the pain brought me down on my knees, i was almost screaming out loud. Screaming and shouting I reached back to campus from the grounds of Allahabad University. I went to see the campus doc at her home as she had already left her office, she prescribed rest. I was trying to be fine with it and thought it would become better as the days went by but after 2 days I found a huge amount of blood collected at the place i had taken the hit (of course the blood had collected behind the skin) and the next day it turned to black. I was shocked at the sight of my foot, the pain was not as much but it was not less significantly. Awantika forced me to show myself to the real doc and so I went to this doc who is largely considered to be the best in the business in Allahabad. She had told me to speak in a good English to him as he had a gr8 diction, well she somehow wanted me to impress him (dunno why, but she knew him..,may be thats why).

I went to him and he seemed nothing like what Awantika had told me, a bit curt and spoke very little. On top of that he ordered an X-Ray and this place called Kriti Labs, the costliest X-Ray dukaan in Alld. Anyways, after he scared the living shit out of me by the xray order, i went to the bank first to get the money for the 400 bucks worth xray and then after 40 min, i was ready with the xray, and awantika, who was juss short of hysterical by now, i all ready to call up amit bhaiya to have me dropped back to campus in case my leg needed to be plastered. Anyways, I went back to the doc with the xray and he said all was well much to my relief. He prescribed something for the swelling and then asked his attendent to tie the crappe bandage around me.

All the while I tried to make some conversation, told him I was from IIIT A, he asked me where i lived coz at present iiit operated from more than one place in the city, all the time keeping my English flawless. Anyways, when it came to making him the payment, I handed him 2 hundred rupee notes and he promptly returned the 1 hundred rupee note, a discount of 50%.

So this is why she wanted me to be good, I had made a good impression on him by my english. Anyways, about 3-4 weeks later, Naman, guy in my batch (who is our goalie and also a member of the basketball team) hurt his thumb in the court. He turned to me to find out which doc to visit. Fresh from my visit, I recommended the same guy. And also told him that he should try to speak to him in English only. That evening I met Naman in the mess and I asked him about the visit and the doc, he told me, "Man that guy sucks, he is curt he is rude, etc etc". I was like, how much did he charge? Teo hundred Naman said. And then Naman promptly added, " I think I need to work on my English!!"

The rhythm

2004-10-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

I tell you, I am on a high whenever i hear those thumping songs, complete with glass-breaking drum-beats, earth-shattering vocals and lyrics from outside this world. I am not talking abt Linkin Park(at least not all their songs) or Metallica. I am talking abt songs which belong to a genre which most people can relate to and are not the exclusive to a cetain section of people who think its cool to swivel their necks at 1000 rpm and then give it a fancy name(HEADBANGING).

Music has got to have punch in it, the right instrument at the right place, the right lyrics treated properly with appropriate variations in tone, and some drum-beats which more than juss vibrate the membrane of our ears, they should reverberate our body and make us vibrate in resonance with their frequency. Music should deliver us from our worldly pursuits, make us forget our sorrows(or successes in that) and let us just be. Be who we ought to be.

When I hear such music, I juss want to dive into "it". Dive head-first into some place I dont where, but I juss want to fly into "it", and become "it" and then stay "it". If such music cannot excite you, then God only knows what can. If this is not orgasm, I dont want to find out what is. I juss want to stay here, and get dissolved in this feeling, its not exactly bliss, but whatever it is, there is no good or bad there, its juss there. We can't qualify it.

And when i see people who can dance to such music, their bodies in complete coherence with the music, now that is what should be called bliss. God has blessed me with two left-feet(and I am not saying this with a straight face). In other words, I cant dance, ohh..I am sorry did u say "dance", I meant I cant even put the "d" in dance. But when i see people doing the thing, their bodies so magnificiently twisting, turning and straightening (sorry couldnt think of better words) with the music, I feel as if God himself has come down to earth. Now, i want you to know that I am saying all this without the rapid gush of blood to any part of my body, and I am not drunk. I juss feel I get a high when i see an elegant dance to an elegant music, thats all.

You know, talking abt elegant things, I get a high even when i see Parli coding. I mean its flawless to say the least. Its like music to my ears. Ha!

The rhythm

2004-10-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

The God of Small Things

2004-10-23T02:50:00.000-07:00

Well, I have had it now. Already sick and tired of it, but the last few days have been the last straw. I had to write it. Dont know how to say it, but lets face it, we Indians(and this includes me) are a brood of petty, rustic people brash in every aspect of daily life. And I mean every. What does daily life actually consist of. Lets try to see. Daily life consists of a number of activities which are hmm...trivial, to say the least. We hardly ever think about them more than once, like our relations with our peers at work or in the classroom, the way we shop, the way we talk to the bus-conductor...u get the point..i am talking abt those things which are very common, trifles actually. But it is in these things that the God of small things lies. We guys have over 1000 Gods in our country some of which we most ardently follow. So what if another God is added to the list? Well, we most often tend to neglect this God. We offer sacrifices to the other Gods, offer thousands of rupees to the temples and do all sorts "havans" to placate the angry Gods, but no, not the God of small things. He is constantly relegated to the bottom of the devotion stack. Now u may thing, is this guy nuts, how do we placate the God of Small things...after all we have never heard of it, apart from the fact that it is the name of a Booker Prize winning novel.

All I am saying is that we should be more careful and observant when we go about doing those daily chores which are of no importance to us. Its like when we are riding our scooter on a narrow lane, we should keep in mind the cyclist coming from the otherside. And if, while walking into the toilet we collide with someone, we should say sorry. And may be the next time someone asks us for coffee, we should "at least have the courtesy to say no", instead of keeping mum. Silly, bucolic fools thats what we are. We are most frugal when it comes to using the P word(please) or the T-word(Thank You) or the S-word(sorry), but some how we are recklessly carefree when it comes to using the F-word or the Hindi versions of it.

Somehow, no one thinks it bad, or even wierd. I mean what the hell is happening? Havent our parents taught us to say Please, THank you, etc when we were young? Where did all those things go. And the most striking thing is not that we dont sorry often, ohh...no ..no sir, the thing which raises my hackles is that the person on the receiving end also has no qualms abt it. He is as happy to be offended(if at all he is) as the other person is in offending him. I mean I saw a scooterist nudge a cyclist, so that both were disbalanced. They didnt even exchanged glances, the scooterist changed gears and was on his way. The cyclist got up back on his cycle and was on his way too. I mean its as if we have become calous, too used to things like this and accept it as our fate.

C'mmon you guys, we are not as bad as this. I mean this is a country where Kings used to leave this Kingdom and go and live in the jungles. They used to leave all their money, all their wealth, even give their lives to keep their word. Those were big things, these are trifles. We should know better than this.

Measurements

2004-10-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

Well as an engineering student, one is taught, among other things, ways and means to measure various entities, both natural or man-made. In fact measurements are on of the corner-stones of problem solving, atleast thats what the dean has been telling us in our Computer Controlled Systems course. So, in keeping with these facts, I often questioned myself as to how would one go about measuring (the completeness of) ones life, as in, where one is headed, how happy one is and blah blah blah. Somehow, I want to think that one can do such a measuring by observing some of the very subtle things in life. Now here is where I think you'll start saying..."Oh..what a kid this guy is..", but like it or not, i sometimes measure my life by asking myself if my nails are cut or not, if I am clean-shaven or do I look like a wretched, sick person, have i folded my bed properly, etc etc. I mean I know these are some of the most trivial things, which we wouldnt give a thought to more than once a day, if not more than once a week. But they are important nonetheless. May be because when I was young, I would get into the good books of my dad(as far as cleanliness was concerned),if i kept myself and my bed clean and well made. And it could be that the effect still lingers, but even so, I still feel that the above matrices could well be effective and wholesome when it comes to measuring the order in one's life.

But then is that all to life, just order and arrangement. Nahi yaar, so many other things, like, for example, happiness. So how does one go about measuring the happiness in ones' life. Tricky!!! At this point, I dont think it would be out of place to mention a line out of John Nash's speech at the Nobel Academy, Stockholm when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, it goes something like this..."..in all my life as a mathematician, I have found that no formula, no equation is more important than the formula of love.....". So there, happiness equals the amount of love in one's life. But its not only love which one receives, its also that which one
gives. Both ways, it only adds to the happiness in life. But then I guess that would scaling down the whole issue, I mean thats not it, I mean one has gotta have a bit of other things in life too to be happy.

One cant survive on full-time love. There are many things(mostly worldy things, that which are material) which one craves for and must attain in order to remain happy. They arise more out of the way we are structured than the pure, chaste need for love, which is universal and without which one cannot go on even for a second. But one thing that I feel is for certain, is that we cannot compare the happiness of 2 people, it just cant be done. And it should not be done. One can only remain as happy as they will, but never as happy as someone else.

Toilets

2004-09-30T00:53:00.000-07:00

Well I have always wanted to write about the various toilets I have used during the past so many years. I kinda think that toilets tell a lot about the people who maintain/use them. Starting off with a public toilet in a shopping mall in Japan. Till date i havent see a cleaner toilet than that. The floor was so spick and span you could sit there and have lunch. The pot was even cleaner. In fact it begged the question, do the Japanese spent half their lives cleaning the damn things, or are they so "not-dirty"! But this toilet really didn't have even an iota of aesthetic beauty to it, it was just a plain ol' toilet which was extraordinarily clean. But one toilet which was complete with architectural finesse and interior designer made crockery was the one i used in a hotel in Mumbai. I mean such was the surprise with which i met the whole thing, i asked myself whether i had entered the right place. The sink was made of transparent glass, blown into a funnel-shaped article. The urinal was pretty basic, that is to say without any crockery, I leave it to your imagination to extrapolate.

One of the most ghastly of toilets i have ever come across was a battered, dungeon-like pigeonhole in the I.L. School(located in Kota, India). While i was a student at Bansal Classes working my ass off for IITJEE(which i cleared in my first attempt), we used to have bi-weekly tests at this school. At one of these tests I had to pee in between the tests. As bad fortune would have it, out of all the possible pigeonholes i could pick, i picked this one(it later turned out that other toilets of IL were better) and had the most disasterous of urinating experiences. After a while i realized i was pissing and vomiting at the same time.

Anyways, moving to a more pleasant experience, this one happened quite recently at a 7 star hotel in Bangalore(The Leela Resort). As one enters the toilet, you will be greeted (in an accent which seems a disconcorted, Karnatic-Englishish..really unique) by an attendant, do your business and he will offer you a towel from which to wipe your hands, that is in case you decide to wash your hands.

Well, talking about public toilets, the cleanest public toilet I have ever seen in India is the one right here in CC1 of IIIT-Allahabad. I mean i was so flattered to see it so clean and the crockery was so....what word do I use...glittering.

Among other toilets which i remember due to their uniqueness, one was the toilet on a gulf-air jet...yaar I tell u the flush was a vaccuum, and made a deafening sound. I got so scared, I thought I would be thrown out of the aircraft!!

Captain's Log

2004-09-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

Some men are born leaders, some have leadership thrust on them, and some become leaders by accident. I think i belong to the last class. And the accident, as told to me very brazenly by someone once, were my Adidas Shoes(soccer shoes). May be that was reason enough for them to make me the captain of the soccer team. But I think I started off with more enthusiasm than anyone else in my batch for this game, and spent a lot of time trying to coax people into playing this game so that I would have someone to play with. That their enthusiasm for it overtook mine later, is another story! The captain of a football team doesn't have as many responsibilities as does the captain of a cricket team, but somehow I felt people giving me undue importance. In my times as a captain, i haven't enjoyed a moment more than the time i lifted the IIIT-A Football tournament running trophy. We danced in mud, we played with it and ate at the swankiest restaurant in town and ate sweet-"PAN". I gifted the smokers of the team packets of cigarettes and treated the non-smokers at the canteen. No moment has been more frustrating than the helpless we faced at being beaten black and blue by an opponent whose supporters out-numbered us 2 to 1, when they were staring at the face of defeat. I haven't been more angry as a captain when a player accused me of corrupt practices, of playing politics against him when he was relegated to the last line of defense. I hadn't been that angry in a long time. I guess I have had to deal with a fair share of politics as well. The best way to deal with politics, I felt, was to do things honestly and with a clear conscience, and with good intentions. Sooner or later people will realize that you are no humbug and you'll have made you point. Out of all the multiferrous experiences i gained from being the captain, one that has left a lasting impression is that a leader has to be a good listener. He cannot and should not discount the views of others and always make space for their ideas and opinions. Especially in a team game, he has to ensure that he has good relations with the rest of the team. The team can do without players letting their game go down due to tensions within the team. I guess i really don't believe in the saying, the captain should lead from the front. I would rather like to believe that a captin should have no problems in letting others lead from the front. A captain is only as good as his team.

If there was one thing that I could change as a captain/player, would be to have stopped K.P. from going over the our supporters side and picking up a nasty fight which would cost both him and us dearly and change our lives for ever.