India

Met Lakshmi Rebecca of “Chai With Lakshmi” fame

Ten months ago, Lakshmi Rebecca emailed me about her online talk show Chai with Lakshmi. I acknowledged her email and gave my standard reply of how this is a personal blog and I don’t do product reviews of any kind. At the same time, I forwarded the website to

Micro targeting

Recently the Obama re-election campaign employed similar population-wide behavioral analytics to micro-target voters to ensure his re-election. There is no reason why we in India must not look to technology to devise ingenious methods for near real time data collection and population-wide analytics of social performance. This will not only

Book review: Thoughts from Jaya, a retelling of Mahabharata

The world around me is very unsettling. First, we have the incompetence of the governments of the day, and then the startling realities highlighted by Satyamev Jayate show, even if it is not the whole truth, and so on. And these strange behavior of man to hurt and not help

Inspired by companies incubated at RTBI, IIT Madras

I am here at IITM, Chennai to help out NextDrop in some technology discussions, and have been blown away by the kinds of companies incubated at the Rural Technology Business Incubation facility (RTBI). For example, consider Stellapps which is developing an automated cow milking system! To get a taste of

Leaving Infibeam

Today is my last day at Infibeam. I’m going to miss working in this environment because I learned a lot about ecommerce and online buying in India. For example, I was surprised to know how much sales go up during Diwali (in hindsight, not so surprising, of course) and

Statistics to wow non-techies about digital future

A common question I get from non-techies is “Is ecommerce for real? Do people really buy online?” My line of argument is that the future is digital, and hence buying online is a natural consequence of that. However, just saying that was not convincing enough. So I gathered some statistics

The real reasons why Indian startups struggle to hire

The last article on difficulty of hiring for startups in India generated a lot of discussion (also see the HackerStreet.India discussion about this article). I was surprised to see so much response within 24 hours. I guess it shows how much of a pain point it actually is: Ramjee

Why is no one talking about the difficulty of hiring for startups in India?

We’ve all heard about how startups are key to the future economy of India and we’ve heard about how hiring should be a top priority for any company – then why is it that hiring is NOT a majorly discussed issue in startup events in India? I ask this

How to get funding from Government of India

I will be speaking in a panel at the HeadStart Conference, Hyderabad today regarding what is the funding that was granted by the Govt. of India to my ex-startup, and how you can apply. I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

Joining InfiBeam

Update: As of 22 June, 2011, I’m no longer with Infibeam. Thanking the community First and foremost, thanks to all who encouraged me, and offered support and help when I wrote about leaving my own company. Many people, without any personal benefit in mind, connected me to very interesting

The 5-year limit to being a coder in India?

Let me start with a story I had heard about long ago when I was at Adobe. There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit

The magic of foss.in

Why do I keep going back to foss.in? Because I’m the kind of person who needs extrinsic motivation. That’s why having a good circle of friends with a positive attitude is so important to me. And that’s why the foss.in community is so important to

Mobile App market in India

Thinking from an entrepreneurial angle, it seems to me that there is almost no mobile app market in India today i.e., it is not a startuppable market. All the successful apps that are making money are transaction-based. For example, ngpay takes a cut from every movie ticket you buy

A few statistics about India

From President’s speech in 2007: * “Today, the average age of India’s population is below 25 years. Approximately, 77 crore of our people, or about 70 percent of the population, fall below the age of 35.” From Tracking The Growth of India’s Middle Class: * “Over the next 20

Vote for the Candidate

I attended a Bangalore South Lok Sabha Candidates’ debate yesterday, this time held at NMKRV Jayanagar and organized by the Rotary Clubs of South Bangalore. Only Capt. Gopinath (Independent) had arrived on time. Ananth Kumar (BJP) arrived a bit late but immediately greeted each and every individual in the hall

Thought for the Day

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from

Where to find startup jobs in India?

If you want to find out what jobs are available in startups in India, then there are myriad resources to check: * VentureWoods * Pluggd.in ‘coffee’ forum * Pluggd.in ecosystem section * Hello Intern * Sutra Jobs * Indian Jobs board at ‘Joel On Software’ * Barcamp Mumbai Startup Jobs section * NEN Startup Jobs section

Ideas are Cheap : Kannada Word Lists

Continuing the “Ideas are Cheap” series, here’s another simple idea that I would personally find very useful but would be difficult to execute in terms of content. These days I’m finding it hard to read Kannada newspapers because my vocabulary is clearly lacking, and consequently I would probably

Product for the future

My favorite session at proto.in 5th edition was by Atul Chitnis who reinforced the basics of business. He made one remark which seems obvious but something that we don’t put in practice: “Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready just in

Water Sports in Sharavathy Valley

Last weekend, I was back in Sharavathy Valley in Shimoga, but this time for some water sports. Here’s a photo essay of the trip: When we were reaching our camp area, the entrance itself was impressive, and I was excited by such clear blue water. We had Breakfast and

Bangalore Ultra Marathon 2008

Sunday was the day of the second Bangalore Ultra Marathon. Had to get up at 3AM in order to reach Cubbon Park at 4:30AM for the buses to take us to ‘Our Native Village’ resort in Hesaraghatta. We reached early at 6AM and were waiting for the day to

Internet usage in India

Every startup needs to do some market research while working on their next big idea. And part of this market research is looking at demographic and economic data to find out the size of your target audience. For most of those who are reading this, the audience probably is people

Mullainagiri, third time lucky as well

This weekend, we climbed Mullainagiri and Bababudanagiri. Even though this is my third visit, it never fails to delight me on its beauty. Mullainagiri and Tadiyandamol are my favorite trekking spots in terms of scenery. In the 3-4 days before the trek, we didn’t spend enough time on the

Common activities means better friends

If you want to make new friends, there is no use in just saying hi to people, something of value should be exchanged or there should be a common activity. That’s when they become friends. Real friends. I’ve added a page on my wiki to list the type

Are electric scooters viable?

I finally had to give away my old Suzuki Samurai bike. It was a 1999 model, which makes it 9 years old. I used to call it ‘The Last Samurai’ because it is one of the few Samurai bikes that I could see on the roads. Sigh. It feels like

Politicians should have a retirement age

If there’s one thing that I wish could change in India, I would vote for having a retirement age for politicians. When there is a concept of retirement for many other careers like engineers, bankers, CEOs, etc. why shouldn’t the same apply for politicians? If the reason for

Cycling To Work at Barcamp Bangalore 7

The weekend before last, BarCamp Bangalore 7 was held. The session that I was most looking forward to was the ‘cycling to work’ session initiated by Pradeep B V (of MapUnity fame). What made the session interesting was that people were asked to cycle to IIMB and showcase their bicycles

Indian Innovations for the Energy Challenge

After reading Atanu Dey on India’s Energy Challenge and Vijay Anand on Why the N-Deal is important, I was wondering if there were some interesting things being done in India regarding energy. And sure enough, I came across these: * Water * Balakrishna has created a turbine to generate power from

proto.in Edition 4 at Delhi

I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time. Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions. The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a

Cricket on your desktop

I’m not a cricket buff but the IPL had got even me hooked. Well, at least during dinner. But for people who are crazy about cricket and want to follow ball-by-ball updates and certainly don’t like refreshing horrible-looking websites, then you might find Cricket Nirvana’s CricketCentre interesting:

Sharavathy Valley Day 2

I thought I would get a damn good sleep in the night because I was so tired. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Not with the snorers around. On top of that, it was so cold and I didn’t have a jacket. I kept tossing and turning all

Sharavathy Valley Day 1

For a while now, I was annoyed by the fact that it has been more than a year and a half since my last trek. So when I saw a call for people who want to join a trek in Shimoga in the [Orkut Bangalore Trekkers group](http://www.orkut.

Smart Techie Startup City

Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup City event. It was intended as a showcase of startups as well as for learning/sharing/mentoring. I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which

Avenue Road

People often say there’s nothing much to see in Bangalore. But if you get to know some of the old parts of Bangalore, you’ll slowly start to see something special. Avenue Road is one such place: This mini documentary was created by my friend Vineetha who was a

The Sunfeast 10K run

I did the Sunfeast 10K Open Run today. I finished in 1 hr 10 min 26 sec. Finally, a timing I am happy about. Best of all, it was a good run. I didn’t have any of my usual performance anxiety symptoms, mostly because I made sure that I

Biking to Ooty

It all started on Monday last week when Lakshman tweeted if anybody was game for a weekend trip.  Ashwin tweeted back saying yes. Later they asked me over email. My reply was “Why Ooty!?”. They replied saying “It doesn’t matter. We’re going for the drive.” Two days later,

Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 2

Day 2 of Barcamp Bangalore No. 6 (Apr 20 Sun) started off on a pleasant note because I just had to stop and admire the greenery of the IIMB campus. Had an impromptu discussion on development on Nokia Phones with Ashwin and another person who worked in Nokia. Surprised to

Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 1

For the uninitiated, Barcamp is an “unconference” which means its a place where people meet, but all the usual rules of a conference do not apply (hence the ‘un’). The best part about any conference is usually the hallway crowds where people say hi and end up engaging in some

Guess who?

It’s Ravana. Watch the trailer if you don’t believe me. Ashok Banker is on a roll: … But their (Rohit Vaid and Abhimanyu Singh, of Contiloe Pictures) enthusiasm, love, and passion for the project hooked me. I signed on, despite myself. Surprising myself, my family, friends. And so Mahayoddha

What is NDTV’s online strategy?

I wonder if all of these are actually part of some game plan: * ndtv.com * ndtvtravels.com * ndtvgadgets.com * ndtvshopping.com * ndtvlumiere.com * ndtvmovies.com * ndtvmusic.com * ndtvgoodtimes.com * ndtvcooks.com * ndtvprofit.com * ndtvimagine.com * doctorndtv.com * cricketndtv.com * etc. It looks to me like they’re trying to mimic

How about an Indian amateur music album?

My latest “power song” is the flagship song of the Colourblind band. Who are these guys? I have no idea. From what I read on their website, they were/are a couple of rockers who got their album recorded with Sony Music India in 1999. Not sure how many copies

Two unofficial traffic rules in India

1. Ignore all honking. Most of the honking is by nincompoops who want to save 30 seconds in travel but waste away their lives during the rest of the day. * Solution: We should ban all horns. It’s purpose has been lost. Reduce the noise pollution, please. 2. Never drive

Searches leading to this website

I gleaned this from a random look at the website logs for two weeks. P.S. What does he/she mean by using orkut effectively? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Urban Development

Around the recent gastroenteritis scare in Bangalore, NDTV was running a poll: Then, there was this whole one hour dedicated to hearing viewpoints from Veerappa Moily, Swathi Ramanathan and the general public regarding Bangalore’s infrastructure. Okay, okay, I know most of you by now are saying “Oh, come on,

Useful Websites for India

Like a broken record, I keep coming back to What are the killer web applications for India? So, I decided to make a list. A list of websites that are useful for most people in India. But what kind of websites am I looking at? The website should be something

How to defend India?

I’ve been provoked and I can’t stop thinking about it. Incident 1. It all started on Day 2 of my Singapore trip (Dec 23 Sun) when a hotel owner was too friendly. Maybe he didn’t have much work, but anyway, he got pretty chatty with us and

Sankranti Rituals

We need more articles like this one by Prof Dr Geetha Viswanathan (emphasis mine): Makara Sankranti, also called the harvest festival or Pongal, falls on January, 14 or 15, when the sun passes from one zodiac sign to another. This festival marks the beginning of Sun’s journey to northern

Innovation in Indian universities?

A while ago, I was asking myself Where are the killer applications on the web for India? Today, when I read ReadWriteWeb’s article on The State of Innovation in India, a thought struck me about the relationship between innovation and universities. Everyone knows the story of about how many

Web Innovation 2007 Day 2

Yesterday, I attended Day 2 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference. The irony to note is that the conference website is so NOT Web 2.0. For example, where are the slides that people can download? These guys can learn a thing or two from the foss.in website and

First Bangalore Ultra Marathon

Today, I caught the 4.45 am transportation to get to ONV for the first ever Bangalore Ultra Marathon where people can get to run or walk 26 or 52 or 78 or 104 km. A true endurance event. I participated in the 26K run. I can’t even imagine

Why I am not running the BSNL Bangalore International Marathon

There has been a lot of press mentions lately about the BSNL Bangalore International Marathon which is going to happen tomorrow. I will not be running it because it is not intended for people who love running. Why do I say that? The Bangalore Ultra Marathon was announced eleven months

Vegetable 2.0

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. The other day, mom was telling me why she has completely switched from the traditional neighbourhood HOPCOMS (Horticultural Produce Cooperative Marketing Societies) outlet to the fresh@ store to buy the vegetables. I got curious and asked to explain.

Getaway

A weekend getaway can do wonders for you.

Hack Day India

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at Bangalore on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this. * 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM * Arrived at Taj. * Registered myself, got the schwag * Met Raghu and discussed the

OpenCoffeeClub 2

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Yesterday morning, I dropped in on the OpenCoffeeClub Bangalore, 2nd edition. It’s supposed to be a place where people interested in entrepreneurship show up, have coffee together and discuss. The theme of the meet was marketing. There

Biking to Hogenakkal

Aug 10 2007 Fri 6 pm. After missing the last night drive that Azmi and Rishi went to, I wanted to go for a night drive too, and Azmi was happy to oblige. At 10pm, I was at his house. We opened up Google Maps, MapMyIndia and the Weather.com.

Marathons in India in 2007

Is it just me or is running becoming popular in India? Take a look at this marathon schedule: 2007 Aug Mysore Half Marathon 2007 Sep Bangalore Times Marathon 2007 Oct Delhi Hutch Half Marathon 2007 Nov Hyderabad Half Marathon 2007 Dec Bangalore RFL Ultra Marathon 2008 Jan Stanchart Mumbai Marathon

Big Bazaar, India Central, Future Dreams

I recently read the “It Happened in India” book. It is the story of Kishore Biyani, the man who created Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Bangalore/Hyderabad Central, EZone, and much much more – effectively, the one person who made retailing a roaring success in India and who had envisioned it much before

Mumbai Family Trip

It was a crazy 4 day trip. Crazy because it was 8 related families going together, that’s a total of 23 people. 23. It should be easy to imagine the cacophony that followed… The highlights of the trip was something like this: sultry mumbai atmosphere, hare krishna mandir, watching

Look out for the new RadioVeRVe

Shreyas, Gaurav and the gang have relaunched RadioVeRVe and it now rocks even more than before! Things they haven’t changed: * They play music by independent bands from India. That’s right, these are all Indian bands. Things I liked: * The new look feels good and is intuitive. How’d

Midnight Marathon

The World’s First Midnight Marathon took place right here in Bangalore on Saturday midnight. It was held in the area surrounding the iGate office near ITPL. Niara and myself had decided to run the half-marathon. We didn’t even think about the full marathon because we have had no

ionized

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. The past couple of weeks has been a rollercoaster ride for us and for ion. Sales has been very good so far, but our observation is that people in India are still hesitant to buy online from reasons

yahoo ishtyle parikrma

After a long wait, the Nandini Layout children sponsored by Yahoo! Bangalore Employees get their own school. And I’m so glad to see that the yahoo sense of humor and style remains: Many of these ideas were pitched in by Shivashankari, one of the most passionate yahoos I’ve

Interview of Abishek Nair

My friend Abishek Nair and myself were recently having a conversation over email where I kept prodding him about what he’s going to do next. You see, being a Bangalorean, he’s not a software engineer! He’s a vfx whiz. In normal English, that means he’s one

ion and the police

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. This incident happened about three weeks ago when the preparations for ion were in full swing, and Vikram and myself worked all day long to create the posters for ion as well as the website itself. At one

The ion : ipod charger, mobile charger and more

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product. Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day! I’m talking about “the ion” – a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug

pink-e

Looks like someone sure loves email!

Sights of a little town

I visited my “native place” Holenarsipura after a gap of one year… it felt good to be back in a little town. Better yet, was getting out of the house at 5.30 am to go for a run, get distracted by a huge green field, and then cross the

proto.in

I was fortunate to attend proto.in in Chennai on Sunday. What was it all about? It’s about startups in India. It was the opportunity for an Indian entrepreneur to showcase his/her ideas and business plans, to look for funding, people to work with, partners or simply grab

Musical Weekend

Although it started with sports, it turned out to be a musical weekend. Saturday afternoon : Parikrma Senior Sports Day Parikrma had a sports meet of the senior children among all its various schools – from Jayanagar to Sahakarnagar, and it was amazing to see all the boisterous children compete against each

foss.in 2006

The past 3 days of foss.in/2006 have been very interesting. As Gopal said, this conference is in the hallways. I’ve seen/had a fair share of amazing conversations from watching a passionate debate of companies “exploiting” people by getting them to work on their open source product

Bangalore Book Festival

I managed to catch the last day of the Bangalore Book Festival 2006 – I was surprised to see the number of people thronging the fair! It was truly a family affair – and we bought nearly a dozen books ranging from spiritual to tech to comics to Sherlock Holmes :). I’m

Anthargange

It seemed the long run on Saturday was not enough, so we took off early on Sunday morning as well, but this time in a car instead of on foot. We headed towards Anthargange. Supposedly, it is a spring (source of water) which explains the name. We were interested because

Trip to the Dark Side

Wanting to do something different, yesterday I made a short dash (if you can call a 12-hour bus journey a ‘dash’…) to Hyderabad to visit an ex-yahoo colleague Kiran as well as a few other friends. And I visited the Microsoft campus :) What’s the first thing I saw? People

Keep ideating

Yesterday night, I met St. John Goldfinger and Paul Jenkins for dinner. They are technology entrepreneurs based in the UK. They were in Bangalore for the EU-Karnataka Asia IT Enterprise 2006 Conference (quite a mouthful) basically looking out for companies to collaborate with on many of their projects. They wanted

Parikrma kids visit Yahoo!

A couple of weeks ago (on July 7th), we had a YEFI Day at work. YEFI stands for Yahoo! Employee Foundation India. As part of the celebrations, we got the Parikrma kids to come and visit our Yahoo! offices. The Jayanagar children (who see me every Saturday) visited the M

Mullainagiri and Bababudangiri

In the first weekend of this month, my trekking gang and myself went to Mullainagiri and Bababudangiri for trekking. We’ve never experienced a “monsoon trek” / “rain trek”, so this was our chance to go for it. I’ve done the Mullainagiri trek before and I was quite looking forward

map(’perl’, ‘india’)

From the latest Perl.com newsletter* : Did you know that the country with the second-largest number of Perl.com readers is India?  That’s right!  Greetings to everyone on the subcontinent; tell your friends about us. * It’s ironic that an O’Reilly site’s newsletter is not archived anywhere

Just Tune In

I’m getting addicted to RadioVerve.  Keep up the good work guys!

Night Drive

A month ago. Saturday evening. Calls at 7.30 pm. 5 friends arrive at 9 pm. We take out the Karnataka map and decide where to go. I suggested that we plan such that we can go to Shivagange for the sunrise and that we should take the shortest route

Google has its eyes on India

From a Times of India article: Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt has predicted that India and not China will become the world’s biggest Internet market in “about five or ten years from now, based on current trends.” And what’s more, Schmidt’s other futurist view is that

Can you answer this?

Yahoo! India launches http://in.answers.yahoo.com. So can you answer these questions? * Did I do a bad job of raising my son? * How can we say that we’re alive? * When I get off at Bangalore aiport, how much will the elephant ride to my hotel cost? * Why

Ex-Yahoos start up

Himanshu Nautiyal, Ruban Phukan and Rajesh Warrier – three ex-yahoos from Bangalore, who now call themselves as RHR Networks Pvt. Ltd, seem to be dabbling in quite a number of things : * PixRat – Bookmark and Tag Photos from the Web (it got techcrunched recently) * GlogBlog – Bangalore Classifieds * Bixee – Search Jobs from all

Mark of respect?

A legend is no more. Dr. Rajkumar was the defining person in the Kannada film industry. I remember his old black and white Kannada movies, especially the ones where he plays the CID investigator… those were such wonderful movies, they had a real story, amazing acting and such pleasant simple

Kannada Wikipedia Meet

Today, I attended the Kannada Wikipedia Meet after reading a mention of it in today’s edition of the Deccan Herald. Unfortunately, I was late and missed the keynote speech by U R Ananthamurthy. When I came in, Professor G Venkatasubbiah  had just started talking about ‘Kannada on Encyclopedia’. The

Car PC, anyone?

From The Hindu: In a bid to take computers to the rural communities in India, global chip major Intel unveiled on Wednesday a new Ruggedised Personal Computer platform designed to withstand adverse weather conditions including heat, dust and humidity and run on alternate power sources, including the car battery.

Radio City Live

I voted for Swarathma and Phenom today evening, and these two were the most-voted bands today :-) I totally digged the Kannada song that Swarathma played.

Have you seen Bangalore like this?

MCC FOSS Day

Yesterday, I talked about Python at the FOSS Day at Mount Carmel College For Women. I was not able to attend the earlier sessions in the day because my team (at work) is making a release soon and as expected, that means crunch time. I managed to make time for

Sunrise at Devarayanadurga

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Happy Republic Day

![91279468][Small][] It was inspiring to listen to President Kalam when he was interacting with the children in CNN-IBN’s programme “All the President’s children.” He spoke about Vision 2020, about how children should get rid of corruption by approaching their parents, and his repeated message that the “540

Lalbagh Flower Show

The Lalbagh Flower Show turned out to be great. The flower arrangements were a feast for the eyes, especially for those with a photographic eye, although most people were point-and-click-photographers like me. ![89764990][Small][] ![89758774][Small][] ![89772640][Small][] ![89774260][Small][] ![89751772][Small][] ![89753307][Small][] ![89755763][Small][] ![89757899][Small][] ![89762236][Small]

Tourism Fair

I visited the Travel and Tourism Fair yesterday at Kanteerava Stadium. It turned out to be a damp squib. ![89657783][Small][] ![89658006][Small][] First of all, the show turned out to be nothing but a big place of tourist agents hawking at customers, and the presentations of the respective states

The Dalhousie Trip

I’m writing this a few days after coming back to Bangalore, because I had to get over my holiday hangover. It seems unfair to gain so much, make so many new friends and have so much fun, and suddenly let it go, and that too, back to the daily

ShreeKumar cycling again

ShreeKumar’s at it again: It’s december, and I am bitten by the travel bug again. This time, I intend to cover the areas on the western coast of India on my cycle. The trip would cover 2000+ kms of gruelling terrain and span 21 days ! From Mangalore, I

Dakshina Kannada Police

I would’ve never expected to see the Dakshana Kannada Police blogging. They have updates on the ZP/TP election results. Also, they have entries in Kannada. (via Sharath)

Hebbe Falls Trek

![72745385][Thumbnail][] ![72745605][Thumbnail][] ![72745691][Thumbnail][] ![72746989][Thumbnail][] ![72747478][Thumbnail][] ![72749002][Thumbnail][] ![72751030][Thumbnail][] ![72752430][Thumbnail][] ![72752932][Thumbnail][] ![72753014][Thumbnail][] ![72753167][Thumbnail][] ![72753251][Thumbnail][] ![72753752][Thumbnail][] From riding on the roof of the jeep, to walking 10 km, to diving in freezin’ cold water, to feasting our eyes to lush

Criccer

Criccer … I don’t know what else to call it. This was a game that is a cross between cricket and soccer, being played in the stadium/grounds near my home. The bowler throws the football and the batsman bats by kicking the football, and then runs. All the other

foss.in day 4

Yesterday was such a long and awesome day. The day started with me missing Taj’s talk on Entropy and I’m still kicking myself for that one. I attended Gora’s talk on IndLinux efforts and I got to know about the various efforts in localization and translations going

foss.in day 3

Today, the keynote address was by Andrew Cowie on Inside|Outside, and it was a brilliant talk. Cowie is a very animated and fun person. The talk was about how people are on the inside or outside of the community and what it takes to cross over. He gave various

foss.in day 2

Today morning, the first session was a Linux Kernel roadmap by Jonathan Corbet. Although I’ve never been a kernel-level guy, the talk was interesting and he clearly explained how features have been added and improved over the various versions, and how the development process has improved and become more

foss.in day 1

Today’s the first day of foss.in/2005 and I actually managed to wake up early. When I reached the venue, I saw a looooong queue of people waiting to get into the place. It seems there was a power outage and because of that, they couldn’t do

Sify trouble

I have been happily using Sify Broadband for many months now. Today, they made some changes to their setup, and boom! no more Sify access for me. All that the client says is a “Internal error. Unable to parse the XML.” I called them up and they asked me to

Conversation in the cab

“Yahoo is like Dravid.” “Google is like Dhoni.” “Microsoft is like Ganguly.”

LinCDs

Continuing the nostalgia, here are pictures of the LinCDs.com shirts that Yashwanth (it was his idea) and myself wore at LB/2003. The LinCDs.com name is a bit worn off now. Those numbers you see below the name is the version numbers that we had at that time.

PESIT FOSS Day

Last Thursday (24th November, 2005), there was a FOSS Day at PESIT, my alma mater. Typically, I managed to leave office and reach PESIT at 4.10 when I was supposed to be there at 4. The venue had shifted from the hall in the “new” building to the MCA

It’s a small utility

When Atul commented about open source being “seen as some kind of ‘hobbyist’ thing” in India, I was reminded of another incident in college. In 6th semester of VTU B.E., we had a DBMS (Database Management Systems) lab. We were supposed to write some software that demonstrates database design,

It doesn’t pay to be honest

Manjunath Shanmugham, an IIM Lucknow graduate, was recently murdered in Uttar Pradesh for trying to expose corrupt petrol pump owners. I am really speechless. Sharad expresses how I feel right now: In today’s world, where do you see this kind of courage and bravery – To say no to someone

REBIEX

Parshu (a colleague in Y! Bangalore) is presenting a session on REBIEX: Record Boundary Identification and Extraction Through Pattern Mining at the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, New York.

Memories of Linux Bangalore 2003

The VTU letter exhorting principals to motivate students to attend foss.in is a far cry from my college days, and perhaps even farther from Kalyan’s days. I remember asking our department’s Assistant HOD (I don’t remember his exact designation) whether our semester laboratory internals tests could

Potholed?

Have you been potholed in Bangalore lately? Yes, the question is supposed to be ironic. Go ahead and report it at BangalorePothole.com.

Thrissur again

I was invited back to Thrissur to present a talk to engineering students. Since I didn’t want to give the same ol’ introductory Python talk at the same place, I decided to talk about TurboGears, since that’s been pretty much the only new thing I’ve had time

Speaking of foss.in…

Looks like the first shortlist of talks for foss.in was not enough, we now have the first list of special speakers: Jeremy Zawodny, Harald Welte, Brian Behlendorf, Rasmus Lerdorf, Dave Phillips, Danese Cooper, Alan Cox (yes, I said Alan Cox)… the list is impressive!

Agriculture in India

Inspite of the “IT is India’s Tomorrow” slogans, Purnima explains why agriculture is still the future of India. (via DesiPundit)

The Vortal

Ashok Banker has started a new novel called The Vortal that’ll be released online in episodes format. The blurbs remind me of Jumanji, but knowing Banker’s writing style, he will have some fast-paced stories ready. There are already 4 parts posted.

Will the real IIPM please stand up?

Gaurav Sabnis has got a legal threat from IIPM for blogging negatively about the IIPM institute. Details at DesiPundit. I really wonder about the credibility of this institute. How can they teach management to students when they themselves don’t know how to manage criticism? Similarly, Mediaah was shut down

A R Rahman Concert

The A R Rahman New Dimensional Tour came to Bangalore yesterday. ![50721766][Small][] ![50721704][Small][] It rained heavily causing the show to start late by 2 hours. Sivamani played a small display of his amazing drums capabilities that kept the crowd satisfied till Rahman entered the stage. When the show

Getting off the chair

Over 300 close family and friends in your home on one day + followed by Ramanagaram trek on Saturday + Savandurga trek on Sunday => me happy Ramanagaram ![44640711][small][] ![44640924][small][] ![44643060][small][] ![44645132][small][] ![44656573][small][] ![44660547][small][] ![44662949][small][] ![44663124][small][] Savandurga ![44626245][small][] ![44627195][small][] ![44627312][small][] ![44628839][small]

Sampada

Nadig and others have started Sampada – a site for all things Kannada. It has taken off really well in a short period. There are Kannada-related articles, blogs, discussions, book reviews, a learning center and any thing you would like to contribute!

Independence Day celebrations at Parikrma

This is a “photocast” of the Independence Day celebrations at the Parikrma Jayanagar school. ![34204132][Small][photo] ![34204357][Small][photo] ![34204444][Small][photo] ![34204589][Small][photo] ![34204768][Small][photo] ![34205021][Small][photo] ![34205084][Small][photo] ![34205461][Small][photo] ![34205999][Small][photo] ![34206492][Small][photo] ![34206578][Small][photo] ![34207206][Small][photo]

Happy Independence Day

![33359516][Medium][] Read about the Indian independence movement on Wikipedia. Update: The  Presidential address.

Care to share… The Parikrma Way

There’s an article on Parikrma in The Hindu. My favorite Parikrma poster is about atoms. Atoms are recycled in this universe, as you probably know. Potentially, we could have atoms that once belonged to Einstein or Mozart. The Parikrma volunteers believe these underserved children have the same potential as

Aamir Khan’s blog

Aamir Khan is blogging as Mangal Pandey? Somebody pinch me, I still can’t believe it. Is this for real? (via Mekin) Update: Scoble confirms it is authentic.

Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005

We had a “Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005” on Friday, August 5th, 2005. It was an internal showcase where all the teams and groups have the chance to showcase their projects and interact and brainstorm ideas on how they can collaborate and use each others’ expertise. For more than a week,

Broadband

I heard that Reliance InfoComm is offering broadband connections of 128 K speed, 10 GB limit for Rs 750 per month.  Has anybody else heard/tried this? That’s heck of a lot better than the 1 GB limit that I have with Sify right now. There have been too

The other parking problem

Well, if you thought the ycantpark photo pool was funny, this one’s even funnier: (from an IM conversation) (12:12:20) Kapil: yesterday we were discussing about the population explosion at y! Bangalore. here is the proof:  I cant get a ip for my pbook coz all the ips

Where are the Indian IT women bloggers?

…. asks Vijayalaxmi in The Telegraph newspaper. Excerpt: Unfortunately, figures on the number of women who blog in India are simply not available. But anecdotal evidence suggests that women write about personal or social issues, unlike men who focus on work-related issues. For instance, there are more chances of a male

Street Harassment

This is one of those things that nobody is willing to talk about, but something has to be done about it. Jasmeen Patheja has started the Blank Noise project to address street harassment, commonly known as eve teasing. More information is in this Deccan Herald article. If you think eve

LB2005

Preparations for this year’s FLOSS meet in Bangalore is well under way. The working title is still LB2005  (Linux/Bangalore 2005) but the name will be changed to something more suitable. As Chitnis mentions, the idea is to promote FLOSS in general, including FLOSS on Windows and proprietary software

What about software patents in India?

The open source community is rejoicing ever since Europe rejected software patents … which leads me to the question, what’s the situation in India? I came across the following pages: * ArsTechnica on “India rejects software patents” * Stallman speaking at Government Model Engineering College * CPI(M) on Patents So, India does

Want to know what India is talking about?

Read Amit Varma’s latest blog mela.

Sleuth

Today evening, I watched the ‘Sleuth’ drama by ACTor theatre and directed by Pawan Kumar. The play has an interesting story and takes a lot of turns and twists. It even has a cheeky sense of humour that’s just about right. As Times of India mentions in Page 2

The Army is here

It has arrived! ![18542188][Medium][] Ashok Banker has autographed it and has written a brief message for me :mrgreen: Come to think of it… I might be the first person in India (other than Ashok himself) to have this book, since it is slated to be released on 16th June!

Language matters

Mulayam Singh Yadav says that English is the “the language of destruction, which has had a telling impact on the economy of India”. It actually reminded me of an incident a few years ago. My family and myself were on a trip (somewhere in Karnataka, I don’t remember the

Python Jobs

This is a sort of a deja vu thought but I’m going to write it anyway. There seems to be quite a hunt for Python guys in India, especially Bangalore. Jace’s client Partecs is looking for people who want to work on Python, Zope, Plone, Javascript, XHTML, CSS,

Do you want to Yahoo! ?

I have completed nearly one year and one month as a Yahoo i.e. including my internship. I even have a blog post on that on the day I joined. It’s hard to remember that just one year ago I was just a college kid. Just one year ago,

Faith and Life

Last weekend, I had been on a pilgrimage with my family to Rameswaram. I have heard that Rameswaram is supposedly the biggest temple in India, although I haven’t been able to confirm that. The highlight of the pilgrimage was that we had to take bath in, or rather poured

Mysore Moments

Two weeks ago (Apr 9-10), I had been to Mysore with family.. I was going through the pictures and many of them have come out really well. I just had to note some of the memorable moments: ![9387789][Small][photo] ![9387930][Small][photo] ![9388108][Small][photo] ![9388370][Small][photo] ![9388476]

Need a Loan?

I’ve been bedridden since the past two days due to bad health. I’ve been struggling and swallowing lots of tablets. Then, I get a call on my mobile and I say Hello. He says “Mr. Swaroop, I’m from City Finance. Do you need a loan?” Now, how

A Heap of Broken Images

On a tip-off from Anita, I had come to know about Girish Karnad’s play ‘A Heap of Broken Images’ at the Ranga Shankara theatre. I just came back from the theatre. I have to mention that I have never been to a real live play before (other than skits

Ruby-India First Meetup

Today was the first meetup of the Ruby-India group (I wanted to announce this on my blog yesterday but the net connection was down at home :|,  all hail Sify). I wanted to attend the intro Ruby talk basically because Premshree yaks about Ruby so much, I realized it was better

Indian Music Online

Most music sites will work only on Windows and that too specifically IE – so I was glad to see that MusicIndiaOnline now works on Linux using the RealOne Player. Their FAQ answers about  how to get it to work on Linux. Btw, I really like this album by Om – The

Renaissance 2005

Travel I travelled to Trichur (also called Thrissur) in Kerala on Friday to attend Renaissance 2005, a FOSS festival at GEC, Trichur, Kerala, India. The festival was conducted by the MCA students of GECT. It was a 3-day event but I attended only the 2nd day – I was there to

Politics, anyone?

Rashmi Bansal asks why the so-called ‘NextGen’ youth Indian politicians haven’t made any impact so far. Let me hazard a guess: Because the oldies haven’t given them a chance to actually accomplish something. I imagine the situation to be like this: Young neta goes to old neta and

BangPypers meet on Saturday

If you live in Bangalore (or happen to be in Bangalore the day after tomorrow) and want to learn about the Python programming language, join us at the BangPypers meet on Saturday! Its going to be a fun day. What’s gonna happen? Here it is: What: Bangalore Python February

Prince of Ayodhya

I just finished reading the book ‘Prince of Ayodhya’, the first volume of a series of books which are a modern re-telling of the great Ramayana by Ashok Banker. The book is simply awesome. I was totally raptured by it and am still in awe of the story. I just

Bangalore Pythonistas list is high traffic!

The BangPypers group was created just 10 days ago. There has already been 202 messages by 44 members! Just goes to show that Python is alive and kicking in Bangalore. BangPypers rule! Uhh.. I mean they sing well ;)

Trek at Thusharagiri

After Saturday’s long Python talk, we returned to the guest house in the evening and I simply crashed on the bed and had a great sleep. On Sunday morning, I was woken up by Dilip saying ‘Hey, its 9 am. We have to go trekking!’. In an hour, we

Talk at FLOSS Meet tomorrow

There is a FLOSS Meet tomorrow at NIT Calicut, Kerala and I will be giving talk on Python along with Pradeep. The organizers informed me that around 100-150 students are expected. Also, apparently, today’s edition of  the New Indian Express features news about the event as well :) Other speakers

First Bangalore Python meetup

As I had announced yesterday, we had a Python meetup at Ebony Restaurant today evening — Ten Pythonistas arrived and we had a rockin’ time :) I knew only Pradeep and Premshree before, I met the other 7 just today – Anand Pillai, Sundar, Owen, Suresh, Anish, Ramdas and Gurpreet. We met up

SLYNUX

Do you consider yourself a geek who loves to use GNU/Linux? Do you think you are one of the true geeks around who knows how to hack at it ? Think again. There’s an article in ‘The Hindu’ about Sharath Lakshman who has developed his own customized distro called

Python workshop at NIT Calicut

I’ve been invited to conduct a workshop on Python at NIT (formerly REC), Calicut, Kerala. It’ll be most probably on 29th of this month (date to be yet confirmed). I’m glad to tell you that Pradeep will be joining me – we’ll be conducting an on-hands session

The IndiBloggies

The 2004 IndiBloggies are here! – these awards are publicly-chosen awards conferred upon bloggers who showcase excellence in the Indian blogosphere. My attention was immediately caught by the extremely simple yet striking design of the site. Very well done by Chugs. I came across many interesting blogs in this list such

Tsunami Relief Efforts

The Tsunami Relief efforts taken up by so many agencies and volunteers are heartening. On our part, Y! Bangalore employees have come together and organized a plan to help out… donations were collected from ourselves and I was happy to note we collected quite a good amount in such a

Joke Falls

I saw Joke Falls a few days ago and I was surprised to see a well made Kannada movie after sooooooooooo long (no exaggeration that). Ironically, it is a hit movie and inspired from an old Dharmendra movie ‘Chupke Chupke’ whereas the hit movie Swades is inspired (strictly in my

Tsunami hits South and South East Asia

Nearly 9000 people have died in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Maldives and Sri Lanka due to a massive tsunami triggered by the largest earthquake the Earth has seen in the past 40 years. I was watching NDTV News and I was totally frightened about the extent of the tragedy and they

Reelity

When you have cousins flying over from Canada and Australia and everybody catches up, you tend to do stuff together. We went bowling and watched Musafir on Sunday.  The movie is worth watching just for Sanjay Dutt! He’s amazing.  My favorite dialogue of the movie is (in Hindi) "Taqdeer

Yahoo! Bangalore looking for good hackers

Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for good people to get involved in some cool projects from UI to the OS! If you are interested, send me a resume and I’ll forward to them to the right guys. Extra bonus points if you have attended my talk at LB ;) Heh heh.

Talking Python

I tried to get some work done yesterday but after a long day and me being the lazy guy that I am, I just went to sleep after getting back… I woke up today morning and started working on the slide and had a few more practical examples comparing some

LB2004 Day 1

Day 1 started with the inauguration of Linux Bangalore/2004 . LB doesn’t have the concept of chief guests, but the chief guest is the audience and so the representatives of various LUGs across India lighted the lamps, on behalf of the audience, to inaugurate the beginning of 3 days

LB 04 is just 5 days away!

Hari Krishnan  made this cool banner. Don’t forget to check out the list of talks/speakers ! Some of the ‘hot’ speakers are: Andi Kleen ( TCP/IP Stack in Linux, Linux x86-64, etc) Andrew Cowie (http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/AndrewCowie) Brian Behlendorf (Apache) Harald Welte ( Netfilter/IPTables, Linux Kernel

Gloomy Weather

It’s such a gloomy weather here in Bangalore… sigh. It’s been raining cats and dogs and as a result I got cold, cough and fever… and I’m just recovering now. However, I did manage to read ‘Ignited Minds’ by Abdul Kalam over the weekend. All I can

VTU == V Torture U

I just wrote the only paper in our last semester of B.E. – Cryptography and Network Security (CNS for short). It was a tough paper! The questions focused on small things such as Hill Cipher for 20 marks! And the others were questions where we were clueless. It’s not

Why Sonia Gandhi as PM of India is a national disaster

In this article by S. Gurumurthy, he clearly points out how Sonia Gandhi has been living in India for 17 years and never lived as an Indian. It makes you stop and wonder, is this the only person we could find to look after our country, a country with one

First Time Vote!

Today, I voted for the first time! I am one of those large number of FTVs (First Time Voters) in India. It is such a thrill to take part in such a humongous exercise of  democracy. After all, India is the largest democracy in the world! I voted for the

Simputer

The Simputer is a brilliant concept from the professors at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It is a low cost alternative to PCs – a small handheld computing device which runs on Linux designed to help IT reach the common man. It costs just around Rs. 9000 and it allows you

Team India Shining

After a stupendous 5th One Day International cricket match between India and Pakistan, Vajpayee takes political advantage of it by making ads about it! But, still, that was a match to remember for a long long time. Sachin’s catch was the turning point of the match! Indiatimes.com has

Back at the GATE

I logged in casually in the afternoon to check my mail and suddenly Yashwanth tells me that GATE results are out! Then Krishna was also online and told me he got 90 percentile. Congrats, dude! The website wouldn’t open for me as it was swamped with visitors, so, Krishna

The Surfin’ Penguin

I finally got a decent 2nd line internet connection from  BSNL – it’s great! It is an ordinary telephone line connection but I have never seen 4-5 kbps average download speed on a telephone line before. I then found out that my friends too surf mostly on Linux because it