Right to Education

Right to education is the much discussed topic currently. For information RTE is the law which gives children the right for primary and secondary schooling. It is the obligation of the state and the central government to provide these basic education to the children. I personally feel the scope of the law is debatable. There are basic questions that come to my mind like: What is does this right means? It is a right of whom? If this is a right of the children then how can they make use of this right? How can a child fight for getting education?

First of all the question comes to mind is why is this right come in the first place? Is it because for drive an inclusive growth which is not possible without providing basic education? or is it because for stopping the child labour, child harassment and other forms of torture to the child? If we analyse the first cause then it seems a good cause. This will not only elevate our education standard at the village and school level but also to reduce poverty, corruption and other forms of practices which slow our economy down. Empowered people at every corner of the country will certainly be a dream and this will improve our system, fight injustice and add to our GDP in general. But all this require proper planning and will power to implement and sustain for years before the benefit starts pouring over.

The second cause is controversial. This is because law to provide basic education is not the only solution for all the problems. This should never be thought to be. This needs to be augmented with proper plan to support the social and cultural frameworks. This requires convincing the parents to send their children to go to school. Child labour is prevalent in India because of poverty and children being considered as breadwinners of families. How can we plan to educate those children unless their families are supported? This requires a major overhaul of the social strata. This needs mass awareness on the families to learn the benefits of education. How education can change their lives and empower them. There needs to be supplementary work at school level to compensate the monetary constraints.

Adding to these there are logistic problems of managing so many schools efficiently and providing the quality with equity. There is the problem of providing quality teachers who are not only skilled but also motivated to teach and keep children to classes because there is a high drop out rate at school levels too. Economic constrains are too there but can be overcome with many innovative procedures.

Overall I would say this is a step in the right direction and needs to be pursued in the proper spirit to take care of our future generation and contribute to the society.

life has changing a bit...

My miseries are getting.... not because I no longer need to work ... :) but I am going to work in an easier manner because my office is coming near to my house. I am getting freed from travelling 15 kms daily on public transport to work at office. The mentioned task used to suck half my energy before reaching office. Now I get to retain lot more energy after reaching office. Ahh...

Last week was eventful with 2 new guys from my college joining out company. I don't know about the reason but definitely their selection is contributed to some extent by my hard work and good will created at present company. Caution: this is just a first person view.

Work place lethargy has gripped at current work place. The creative energy is not coming out and time is spent on a bit of politics and "pehle aap pehle aap" style behaviours.... God when will this courtesy behaviour end?....  Anyways I am not gonna be swayed by all this...

Coming are a couple of interviews which I don't have any idea how to go about. After reading a couple of interviews posted by some people I have again come back to the place where I was earlier. This is perhaps because interviews are supposed to be  personal and the situation of one can't be applied to the other.... Hoping to do well..... and keep it personal....

Value based leadership...

I was just reading Mr Narayan Murty's book "A Better India, A better World".  As an adjudicator of capitalism over communism, he has always disparaged communism as not worthy of job generation, economic prosperity. But today's scenario has proved to be slightly in favour of communism as we can see from growth of China and government intervened India and other similar countries. But here comes Mr Murty's words of wisdom - "Value based leaders can only salvage the glory of capitalism".

The economic crisis has shown how the greed of a few ( head of banking organisations ) can make such devastations to economy. We need leaders in those institutions which are socially responsible, value based and are global in outlook.  Leadership indeed is the crux of the issue here. Shouldn't American banks learn from their Europian and Asian counterparts? Does greed really drive economy or its just a tool to hide some people's hidden motives?

Building business without social values and proper leadership will only lead to destruction like we are seeing today. Let's hope companies, the shareholders, the big individual investors all realise this and cultivate the value based leadership.

Why not build a local search engine...

Why not build a local search engine ? I mean it would have everything related to local data. We can use the search engine to list down all the bloggers in Bangalore, all the vendors, all the forums for bangalore, all the small shops, important places, the good restaurants, good movie theatres, good amusement parks, good shopping malls, what is the current events, showbiz, transportation, parks and all the other goodies. The point is to make socialisation more relevant in the local level. Encouraging people to come and write and share their experiences in the local level and making a good reference site for all.

In many sites there is lack of proper structure for such feedbacks and experiences. Sometimes the reviews are presented in an unreadable format. So yeah presentation is important and the relevance of the post shown to the user is also relevant. By doing this we can server the Bangalore people well ...:)

The problem would be obvious I think is to manage the data well and resolving the latency and maintaining the site with good feedbacks, spam protection and other hacking issues. But wouldn't this idea be worth trying? Hmm...

Sachin is the best !!

Sachin has finally broken the 200 barrier in ODI. This has been a fitting tribute to his long career. How else could justify the amount of love and passion for the game?

Sachin has been improving with the age. Improving in the sense scoring more runs and becoming more fit !!. Actually i think he has been able to optimise his energy. Earlier he used to try and score a 100 in each innings but now he wants to put the best foot forward. He is performing well in key matches. Taking the responsibility to see his team through. After all that is what his critics want him to do. But Sachin's style, class, aggression and commitment has remained the same.

He plays with the same concentration. Bats with the same balance and technique. Infact he uses the same cricketing brain as he has used before. Hasn't he been able to carry India in many many occasions? when he plays he just dominates. Be it McGrath, Warne, Akhtar or Steyn. These bowlers look just pedestrian trying to learn art of bowling. There is so much one can learn from Sachin's batting like how to play the proper shots, how to pace ur innings and how to maximise when you are on song. So what has changes in recent years?

Perhaps the pressure on him to perform has decreased. The team has grown up and has shown professionalism and there are people who can support Sachin which was not the case earlier. But as long as Sachin enjoys his game he will continue to break the records. The flow of poetry from batting will continue to exist and everyone including me will say "Hail Sachin !! the Master !!"

Maoist culture... good or bad !!

Maoism has started from Mao Zedung. Mao Zedung was the popular leader in China, who argued and fought for the equality and oppression against the peasants in the villages. Mao had strong views against the government because of lack of well being towards the peasants. They were underpaid for their services and they were forced to vacate the land sometimes for the building of the industries by the government. So the civil fight started against the government. The Maoism was against the power remaining in the hands of the elite and argued that peasants should be given enough power in the administration. Somehow this struggle turned into a armed struggle.

Maoism is spreading in the east Asia, especially in India, Nepal etc. Nepal has a maoist government and India too is now seeing the upsurge of maoist leaders or political parties supporting maoist ideas. The later may be politically motivated to capture the vote but yes maoist have arrived in India. Take the example of the violence in Kolkata where maoist tried to kill the CM or take the incidents that happen in the Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar where several people, government administrator and MPs are killed, maoists are spreading their battle everywhere.

So what do they want? The demands are several. Give them economic and social rehabilitation and provide them facilities to raise their livelihoods. They want political participation in Indian government and also special consideration for their people. The centuries of oppression and neglect by the govt., whatever may be the case as corruption, lack of reach of government or the lack of suitable leaders to take up their cause, their anger against the government has erupted now. The policies of the state has also played their part, as the people living in those areas are asked to vacate certain areas because of economic opportunity for the states. In all there are a lot of reasons for them to be angry. This has unfortunately lead to arm struggle.

So what is the solution? Can the government's decision to kill this armed struggle by arm justified? Some right wing activists will argue for this as these class of people are no where near to contribute to the economy, so doing a cost-benefit analysis will point to that. But what about the disruptions in the social and economic activities ? What about we getting distracted towards their struggle? What about this movement turning out in a big way and threatening to become an issue like Kashmir? Perhaps govt force will outweigh their force and its futile for their part to keep this battle going, because they will loose. So making a decision to raise the concern in front of the govt and trying to find reasonable solution in this case will help everyone.

Lets hope the future steps will be in right direction !!!

Increasing the reach of online campaigns

In the online ad industry, the challenge is 2 fold. One is to increase the reach of your campaign by giving them a wide range of publisher sites to choose from. The publisher site can range from the basic publisher or premium publisher. The difference between the two is generally driven by the amount of traffic they attract to their website. Then there are a different level of publishers like "blogs", "twitters", "social-networks" which can either come in the basic or the premium size publisher. For example an ordinary blog might come in the basic publisher category and the social networking sites like facebook, twitter can come in a different bucket.

So the question is how to increase the reach of the ad-campaigns? Lets discuss what google has done in this regard. Google not only displays the search-ads which is tied with its search-engine, but also it displays context-based ads which are driven by context and user behaviour. But the google's publisher list is just ever expanding, which includes blogs, orkut, mails and other spawned mediums by the next generation web called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 enables websites to add dynamic contents into their page by the help of javascripts or widgets which can be referencing some remote ad server. So by these simple innocuous tools, Google has built its reach to such an extent.

The second factor that comes here is the relevance of ads. In terms of the relevance depending on the content and behaviour of user, Google has been able to deliver ads which are very much relevant to the person visiting the site. So relevance helps to improve the ROI of the campaign i.e showing the ads at the correct place, at the correct time and to the correct person can really improve the click-through rate for the ads.

Talking the explosive growth of google, it has benefited by it search engine ...hmm i would rather say the "matching engine" here which can match the words into appropriate content and calculate a relevant score. So this process works not only for Google's search page but also for the ads too. I am not bothered by how it's doing those matching very fast: most probabely by matching the metadata of the content with the searched key words, which is very powerful indeed to go to the depth of the searching process.

Is google's process replicable? May be but seems very difficult because this requires huge investment from Tech companies ... and some are doing it like Microsoft... but that will take time to catch up.

But there can be many small scale search done or in other words a search performed to a lesser depth with some customised variables..(very obvious??). There can be many improvements done by small tech firms and try to reach the customers to a higher degree of breadth.

Lets hope someone would come-up with some innovation ... specially in tech and Web 2.0 wise...