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...

What is required to become a manager?

This is just a random thought about what do we require to be a manager. Now a days becoming a manager has become synonymous to prestige and responsibility. Lets analyse both the aspects.

Manager role certainly attracts prestige because of the responsibility people are required to handle in the job. A manager not only manages people of varied characters and potentials to deliver the goods for the company, he also handles the legal aspects and the client aspects for companies. So does the prestige comes at a price ? Definitely YES.

Lets take an example in IT industry. A programmer is only concerned with his sub-routine and he can quickly check his performance and be aloof with the other works of the company. But what about the Project Manager? He has the responsibility of making the work place safe and non-intimidating to anyone. Carrying the team with himself for a long time with getting respect from team members without demanding it can be a delicate task. The performance of his, is also evaluated in long term, with objectives set quarterly, half-yearly or yearly.... reminds of annual exams... huh !! yes prestige is given, but u earn it too.

Last thought regarding managers is many people think at early stages of their career to become a manager straight away. This is not at all real and there is requirement of work experience of significant amount to handle the functional matter. So it takes a person with very good knowledge min of 8-10 years to reach a management position. I can give example of Infosys here. In the period of IT's early boom people with 6 years of exp were given management responsibilities who even didn;t have the required technical knowledge in management. So after this Infosys had to put a min of 6 years technical exposure for becoming a project manager. So there comes a question of what happens to people from IIM's in India, most of whom are freshers? Hmmm.... i don't have a explanation but if i go by what i said above then yes they would have to climb the ladder too. So an MBA degree will not jump a person somewhere, experience counts.

Has BJP learned the lessons?

Is BJP (Bhartiya Junta Party) learning from its mistakes which led it being thrown out from government and being failed to perform to expectations?

After the recent LokSabha defeat, BJP leaders are intro-specting (chintan baithak) about where they went wrong. BJP was principally hampered by the division inside the party cadres. The division was apparent and there were groups of people who were not satisfied by their leadership and their overall agenda. Consider the case of support for Narendra Modi for chief ministerial candidate, there was only a certain section who favoured the proposal. This division showed the lack of acceptance towards the leadership of Advani. So the confusion created from this sent a wrong message to the voters over how is the party is functioning.

Then there is a lack of neutral and unbiased leadership from BJP in the sense that it has not been able to unearth a leader like Bajpayee who could carry the nationalistic growth agenda with the politics and RSS with himself. Advani's name has been too many times joined with Ayodhya issue and his close links with RSS and the pro-hindu stand has not gone well with the educated masses. Just have a look at his rival Manmohan Singh, a phd scholar and has a good track record with economic reforms under Narasimha Rao's government, which makes him pro-growth and hence favoured candidate with educated middle class. Does BJP could not see this coming or the leaders were too arrogant to pursue their interest ahead of the party's in the sense that they hesitated to throw young people into the leadership roles? Perhaps it can learn from Mayawati's regime as to how playing the communal card doesn't ensure longterm benefits for the party.

Having said all about the reasons of failure of the party, it has amended its way to somewhat. The first good decision was to appoint Gadkare as the party president and allow him to build his team around it. Gadkare's recent comments have given directions to party as to make it realize the mistakes and take actions. BJP's soul-searching would continue for sometime now till they get their party in order. But what matters is that it should continue to push its agenda of good governance, development, transparency and stop playing the communal undertone. At least we need a good opposition to have a good democracy.

Should Abortion be allowed ?

Lets first define what abortion is. By dictionary definition, Abortion is removal of foetus or embryo from uterus in order to terminate pregnancy. In other ward removal by medical procedure or any voluntary action of the individual to end the "life" of the foetus. The issue of allowing abortion to continue or not has been debated from two point of views. One is pro-life and pro-choice.

Pro-life supporters argue that the abortion is killing of an individual against his/her own will. So if a couple takes a decision to have abortion then they are basically imposing their decision on a baby and killing a baby can be considered equivalent to killing civilians in a war operation. So we can say there is a human rights issue here. So the question asked is if we can fight for stopping war which kills innocent people, why can't we act to kill babies? Who gives the right to kill an future individual?

Coming to the pro-choice point of view, people believe that every individual has a right to decide how he can use his body and take decisions involving himself. So this means that if we can have freedom of speech, freedom of expression then why can't we have choice for people to have abortion ? Aren't we taking away the right of the individual when we force laws not to allow abortion? What are the socio-economic implications of his decision in that how can he be helped to raise the baby?

Although these point of views are true by themselves, they are not true wholely when applied to different cases. So in cases involving dangers to the health of the mother, in cases when the couple are afraid of being humiliated in case of child-birth the individual should be given the option of abortion. But generally people argue that the couple should be responsible and should conceive child when they are ready. But this doesn't happen in reality. Similarly teenagers involved in unsafe sex are also victim of abortion and here pro-choice people are not entirely true also.

There some weird thoughts like if we don;t stop abortions then we'll help increase in population and which will lead to less economic prosperity which might not be true in the sense that there can be a huge work force leading greater labour power !! It is also invalid to link abortion with population growth and economic prosperity.

I personally view this can't be left to people should be given choice of abortion under certain compelling conditions like high risk pregnancy leading to loss of life, rape like extreme circumstances. But then government intervention will be required in other case leading to proper care of abandoned children and avoiding them going to crime and illegal trades.

Should GD/PI be a part of selection process in management schools?

GD/PI(Group Discussion and Personal Interview) are used in selection process of major management schools in India after the aptitude test. This is a 2 stage process i.e GD and PI. GD involves discussing a group of 8-12 candidates for a certain time (15-50 mins) and PI is personal interview by the b-school panel.

So coming to relevance of GD in selection process of b-school, i think its pretty valid. GD involves on-spot thinking about a topic, presenting the content in a coherent manner, building on others contents to add different perspectives. Overall it tests an individual's contribution in a group environment. As in later corporate lives, people have to discuss on different problems and will have to arrive at a consensus, it has a very valid connection in real life.

But there can be significant cons of GD in a global context where it is very difficult to exchange ideas and let's say arrive at a consensus after 15-30 mins. It is difficult to reconcile multiple view points by different members who have very wide backgrounds. Sometimes it can happen that the group loses focus or there is a conflict among the groups on certain points and the whole discussion might end without having agreements among group members in crucial points. So does GD is a complete solution in this case?

PI is always considered as an important part to assess one's personality. PIs are intensive and focus on individual's different characteristics and get a feedback on one's motivation, creativity, knowledge and other qualities. This has been an irreplaceable part of selection process.

There are somecases when Essay Writing has been give more credit than GD as essay writing covers more depth as an individual how one has progressed and how creative you are. Many of the global mba programs take essays as evaluation criteria and rightly so as it gives them more idea and time to judge a candidate compared to a short GD.

So I would say these process can be evolved and modified so as to asses one's capabilities in proper manner and without making any haste.

Television is turning everyone in India from watchers to doers?

Television has been the hottest asset in Indian household. Starting from a villages where people gather to watch the evening shows to the big families enjoying the DTH services in television, everyone is exposed to television. Television in India is popular because of the family culture and the need to seek entertainment. The travel to far places to watch operas and other shows have been made accessible through TV. But what has been the impact of TV on our lives?

Pictures say a thousand words !! and that too videos !! TV by default becomes the most accessible medium to everyone in the society compared to newspaper. It delivers messages concisely and clearly which even a illiterate can understand. So there are many benefits of this. But we should look at the people engaged in watching TV. We can agree that most of its viewers are children and housewives. The basic reason behind is the availability of time in hand which couldn't be utilised in any creative way. Even this happens to students in College Hostels, where people skip classes or even labs to watch a cricket match. So in case of housewives its pardonable but what in case of students? This points us towards re-assessment of our processes so as to make them more creative , even better than those cool TV commercials !! There a thousand different ways to do creative and useful things like participating in sports to build health, participate in social programs to help poor and helpless ones and etc. TV comes here as a distracting and irritating medium on our way to pursue different things. I would rather go on and ask a question as how much better we are 50 years back and now with so much influence of TV? Has it not stopped us from pursuing better things?

Many can argue that TV has spread information like anything and helped clear our society from myths, superstitions and other irrational customs. This is welcome and has contributed in a positive way. But i would like to end with the question that has TV become so mature as to people spend time there rather doing some thinking or doing some work which is creative?

IT revolution has done more harm than good to India !

Let us first define what is IT revolution and how it has impacted India. Information Technology(IT) means utilising software programmes to solves many problems in business or improving people's lives. IT came to India in early 21st century by the efforts of enterprenuers like Narayan Murhty, who realised the potential of Indian knowledge base to efficiently build software projects and soon after the world followed and India became a IT powerhouse in the sense that it can deliver quality products at a competitive price. So as a result of this lot of Indian got good jobs and also the PPP of people in the domain increased significantly. This also bought lot of foreign FDI/FII as to supplement the necessary demand created in infrastructure, communication, transport and other industries. IT and related services industry contributed significantly to our GDP.

So now let us come to the question of whether IT has done good or harmed us. Like there are 2 sides to a coin, there are pros and cons of this issue.

The benefits of IT revolution is quite known. IT drives our employement and majority of our workforce, especially graduates in Engineering domain have been recruited in this industry. This has eased of the pressure on the educational institutes and the Govt to provide jobs to graduates. Not only jobs but also it has given hope to ordinary student from a small town to educate himself and earn in this industry. This way it has a major impact on the society and education as a whole. This has attracted the funds to our country and fuelled our economic growth at a faster rate.

There are negative aspects of this also. If you consider the ITES industry, the people recruited are not even graduates and they quite education early to make easy money, which has a bad impact on society as a whole. The call centre culture has had a bad image on the students by forcing them to work in night shifts and thereby disturbing their natural routine. Then there is increased pay which contributes to people getting diverted from other industries into IT. This affects growth of other industries too as in good talented students join IT and don't prefer manufacturing, chemical, textile or other industries even if they have done major studies in those areas. This is a bad thing in the 21st century when India is driving to increase its industrial output and innovate in manufacturing and service industry has hampered in that aspect.

But overall I would say IT industry has triggered the Indian growth and utilising Indian talent in a way that was never conceived. But we need to pause and reassess our strength and our vision to optimise our resources so that we don't lag behind the world in innovation.

Are women better managers than men?

This topic has been discussed number of times on news media, shows etc. But this is a flawed way to pose questions like this. Let's try to understand what this question means. The terms "better managers" is the point of contention here. So before giving an opinion about the topic, let's first understand what makes a person a better manager? There are lot of skills like better people management, better management in terms of resources, employees, clients, handling stressful situations, prioritising task etc etc. As the qualities seem by themselves don't have any gender bias to them. But certainly they are.

Women have the traditional maternal attributes in them which make them to be empathising and caring toward people. Women are more intent to listen and understand others and handle conflicting and stressful situations in work place far more better than men. Although this can be true about men too. But going by the stereotypical roles of women above is true.

Whereas men are good at problem solving, risk taking, hard working and they are driven. Men can drive many work and are goal oriented and good at hard skills. But there are also examples of women doing in hard skills and being driven to achieve their targets.

So if we get out of our stereotypical mindset and start analysing a person based on their skills and qualities then we can refrain ourselves from asking these kind of questions. We should ask whether a person is good manager or not.

India vs SA 2nd Test day 1

India vs SA test day 1 was very fascinating as in how history repeated itself and India rose from the death bed. Rarely can we notice such fascinating turn around in test matches when one team demolishes the other and then comes to the next match with the momentum and it seems to carry the same form into the match and suddenly find itself being stopped and and at a stage of bother. This happens only in India !!! That too i would say this happens only at Eden Gardens Kolkata. History has repeated and India has found itself again coming on top after being pushed into the corner. This time again the happy hunting ground of turbanator, Bhajji, with the help of the Kolkata crowd has managed to do it.

The day started cheerfully though for India with dismissal of Smith, India lost it afterwards till tea. The bowlers were carted around like rookies trying to learn the art of bowling by SA batsmen, Amla and Peterson. But one thing that gave the hint of Indian bowling's resilience was the way Ishant came back in the second spell and bombarded Amla with bouncers. That really was the turning point of the game and i think it gave the others confidence to do well. With some irresponsible shots by both players and some brilliant fielding by India team India managed to claw its way back to game. With loss of 9 wickets for 266 SA is definitely on back foot and India can only hope to fare better as the match progresses.

Day 1 belonged to India...

Should we allow BT Brinjal to be used in our society?

Introduction of genetically modified food in India has been received with suspicion and restraint. There are many valid reasons for this.

Firstly, lack of understanding about the effects of Bt Brinjal. There is a lack of complete understanding among the people about the effects of growing or consuming bio-tech foods. There has been no comprehensive study done in this regard as to indicate what is the effect of the food within our body. The company which has introduced this product has done tests on rats for a duration of 90 days without any harmful effects and it claims this will be equivalent to approximately 20-21 years in human life. But many biologists argue that projected figure on human life can be wrong and should treated with a different set of parameters. So there is lack of complete research and tests on this kind of products.

Secondly, there is lack of trust in tests conducted by the research companies. The lack of trust comes from conflict of interest. This is because most of the people who are involved in the research of these new bio tech products are engaged by private partnerships with bio-tech companies. So there is no un-biased view in this matter. We can ask ourselves as How many bio-tech companies have not come in controversial cases? How many drug, pharmacheutical manufactures are not involved in the production of controversial and potentially fatal drugs?

Thirdly, the effects of the genetically modified(GM) foods on soil and environment are un-tested. What is the long term impact of these crops on the soil fertility? What is the impact on the environment? These things are never assessed by the companies and nor by the government. So a holistic analysis of these crops on society is required.

It's true that the introduction of Bt brinjal can help in tackling food shortage and help controlling food crisis by reducing increasing food production while bringing down the cost. But at the same time we should be careful in introducing such products only after doing a completely analysis of the crops. There have been suggestions of labeling food products in markets with their GM content and helping the consumer aware of it. Then we shouldn't rush to BT products without considering alternative solutions like increasing productivity of our lands, decreasing food wastage (which is around 40%) and effectively managing our supply chain. The govt has been good in being careful in introducing bt products and owning the confidence of public in general.

mom-and-pop stores where to advertise online?

Where can mom-and-pop stored advertise online? These people have small stores and their business is pretty small. They stand no where when it comes to buying placements online when they go to let say Google or a big ad-firm because they are out-bided by the big companies in their business. So where do these people go?

Advertising from mom-and-pop businesses like dry cleaners, hair salons and cafes is a $29 billion market, according to BIA/Kelsey and a very minor portion of it only comes online although the people themselves are interested in going online. Some companies(like Yelp) have realised this and have started local search engines where one can buy placements for ads and sometimes they can only pay for something like "yellow tags" on a map which in turn directs people to go to their website. This can be thought of as in direct competition with yellow-pages. Google has started giving this kind of services too but there is a question that can Google reach to these small businesses?

Yelp and similar companies have benefited from building local search engines and showing search ads. Yelp's success has been their cost effectiveness and trapping the local market and as expected Google did try to take over Yelp but failed in its attempt.

Should the prescription of Euthansia be allowed to continue?

Euthansia or "will killing" has been popular in recent decades mainly in the West. Euthansia has been administered to persons terminally ill in certain dieseaes where the patient has been reduced to a vegetative state because of sever injury or the patient has no hope of returning to the normal condition and death would become a pain-reliever for such person. In these cases Euthansia has been allowed to persons according to their will.

Many people have termed euthansia as a right to die. This has become prevelant in people who think there should be absolute freedom to a person who wishes to end his life because of severe pain etc. There are people who think the state or the law shouldn't interfere with this individual right. Because of the above reasons euthansia has been made legal in US and some countries like Netherlands. In these countries euthansia is administered after the consent of one physchologist and one medical practioner who are outside the purview of the case. But some people have been demanding more liberal laws which will allow people to end their life without any legal intervention.

There are some examples when people have been arrested because of unlawful action in administering euthansia. In UK a father killed his son by giving excessive dose of Heroin. As per him, his son suffered a terrible accident and received sever brain injuries which reduced his son to a vegetative state. The father thought his son's life has become a "living hell" and he could no more return to his normal condition unable to enjoy the life. So it was sensible decision to end his son's life. But since the death happened without any consent of the individual and without any legal procedure, the person was sentenced to 9 years of priosnment. But this raises the question did the person did something wrong? Is the law itslef can't allow a person to die even if wants it without having any second opinion?

In India many people are raising this debate as to whether allow euthansia in India or not. A group of these activist organized an essay competetion to be held expressing their opinion in this matter. To their surprise a significant portion of the participants had views that euthansia lacks transparency and something of a bad practice. So from this we can see there is a lack of awareness among people about euthansia and a certain degree of education is important in this regard.

I believe euthansia is a last resort to solve the problems but simulataneously a person's opinion on how his life can be treated with should be allowed and in no way be imposed by any law. We need to think this topic in its perspective as to how to benefit people who are suffering from incurable pain and allow their relatives or friends to end the person's life without any legal implications. After all its the state of pain the individual posses is the matter of debate and death followes when we run out of alternatives.

finding suitable date by running algorithmic love calculator

This is very interesting stuff as to how softwares can predict dating results by running algorithms which will tell matches from statistical data. People are busy designing question and tracking their answers from users and building data to run their dating algorithms.

There is one such site called http://www.okcupid.com/ which is trying to predict matches and also functions are providing tips to find the match .

The best thing about it's matching engine is the way the match is determined. It says that the questions are raised by the users and not the staff and the questions are thrown to new users and existing ones and they are judged by their "goodness". Goodness is determined by people reacting strongly to the questions like "I disagree" or "I completely agree with this" and the best questions are those having these extreme reactions. These sort of questions are taken for deciding the matches.

The interesting thing I liked about the founders when they say that we are not "psychologist" but we are "math guys". The site is pretty new but they were survived by a blog (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/06/25/rape-fantasies-and-hygiene-by-state/) since 2004.

I think these guys are on their way to capture a big pie from this match making industry.

Can India [Cricket] pull it off against SA?

After losing the first of the 2 test home-series to SA, India would be under pressure to defend its home record and square the series. The manner in which the first test ended is exasperating. India were beaten in every department in all the sessions, except when Sehwag and Tendulkar batted. Part of this debacle is because of the faulty squad selection for the test and also because of good show by SA players and poor show by their Indian counterparts. Hopefully selector have learnt their lessons (Srikant's acceptance of error) and the players have devised a strategy to beat SA. India's strategy has been questioned after it failed to perform well in a turner (pitch) in 1st test and the way spinners were countered by SA especially Kallis and Amla. Perhaps India think tank would come out more positive against these 2 key players.
Talking about the ground, Kolkata, Eden Gardens has been a lucky ground for India. Here Indian team, with leadership of Ganguly had won against the memorable match against Steve Waugh's team, back in 2001. Lets hope Dhoni would be able to repeat the same feat which would enable India to retain its no 1 ranking and respect of not loosing the home series. Dhoni has been a good captain and the return of Laxman would boost Indian line-up and empower them to win this test match.
All the best to team India !!

Is Google about marketing or a really good product?

today, as i was strolling with friends near my home, someone suggested that Google is not really about a great product and its about a brand and good amount of marketing. As per this view Google may be having a great product, i.e the search engine, which can produce relevant results for a query, but the popularity of google comes from the "brand" that has been created. Its like Google has become synonymous to search engine and people whenever they want to research about something they "google" it. I think this is true to a certain extent that google has created a brand. Google brand is everywhere: search, mail, talk, blog etc. So lets think about this, why is this? First of all its true that Google's search results are relevant, but so are Yahoo's or lets say Microsoft's. So why is it that Google's search engine is more popular? Is it because of Google's page-rank algorithm? or is it because google's intuitiveness and simplicity? I think we can all agree that all these features can be replicated and are not that important. Somehow Google has stick to a core agenda of providing search based ads without really getting diverted into too much other areas as Yahoo has. Search Engine's tried too many different things trying to attract more traffic but what emerged as the way Google has been able to cater to results in a very lucid manner. I am not sure though this is the only reason as to how Google has been able to build a "brand". But yeah customer perception can shape the future of search engine's in a powerful way. With this lets stop here to think more about this and return to this topic in future.

Crisis in Indian Hockey

Let us analyze why and how Indian Hockey has degraded from being the National Sport of India to the point where players had to pose a strike in order to remind of the neglect of the game to us.

First of all let's start from 1952 when India used to be the champion in the grass-hockey. The wizardry of Indian hockey men were proven in Moscow Olympics and the next 5 consecutive Olympic games, where India had bagged 6 gold medals in all. But gradually because of nationalization of the game or so to say the politicization of the game has contributed towards its neglect.

To start with causes of the degradation, the first is the inability to adapt to the turf hockey of the administration. The decisions to delay the introduction of synthetic turfs in Hockey games nation wide contributed to the incompetence of Indian Hockey men. This has contributed towards bad performance of India in major championships.

Secondly, inappropriate payment of dues to hockey players has caused players to languish in necessary resources for survival. The overall mismanagement of food and pay has contributed at national level is utterly regrettable. If an Indian cricket player can get a better package while playing as 12th man where he rests most of the time, then how come a hockey player can't get his dues while he is playing at a national level?

Thirdly the lack of fund management of hockey administrators reflects their lack of passion to keep the national sport alive. If Cricket board can go ahead and arrange IPL with major nations then why can't the hockey board is lagging behind in this? And most importantly perhaps the administration needs to do some self-introspection in where they need to spend the funds : by giving fringe benefits to executives or to fulfill the basic facilities of the players who play for the nation?

The last and most importantly is public and media's apathy towards the game. Why shouldn't parents train their people to become like Dhanraj Pillay or Baljit Singh and instead send their children to follow steps of Dhoni? There is perhaps a lack of motivation in playing for nation in hockey whereas satisfaction even playing in state level cricket matches. The only players playing in the national hockey team are the ones who have struggled hard to follow their passions. And the utter way they have been treated is pathetic !.

The only thing that can save indian hockey is the change in attitude of its management and the public and media interest in the game. Perhaps the management can follow cricket board in how they have revamped their selection process and fund management.