A 50 something father of two ladies who is a close aquiantance is frantically searching for the right bridgroom for his daughter who is an IT professional. Given the fact that his elder daughter, who is also an IT professional settled in the US of A, the Mecca of all new age professional, has married into a rich family, he has to find an equal match. And other than finding about a possible bridegroom's character, all that matters for him (the father) is whether he is a IT professional settled in the US, a BE from a reputed institute, his salary, whether his parents are professionals.
And the girl too is happy with this arrangement. It hardly matters whether the boy's temperament suits you, or his character.
Will only having lots of money make you happy? Or are you only successful if you are in a professional making lots of money? I often wonder what these parents and kids think of other people around them who are in other fields or are making less money?
Unfortunately, my mother too seems to subscribe to the view that only lots of money can make any one happy!
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Timemachine
Well actually it is not a time-machine in the real sense of the term. It is actually the Old Bridge across the Yamuna, the Iron bridge from British Raj.
I have travelled across the bridge many times and it never ceases to amaze me. It is actually two bridges in one. there is the rail bridge and underneath it is the one for all sorts of transport. And it is this fact that gives it a sort of time-machine quality.
The bridge is a marvel of engineering. Nowhere else have I seen such an antiquated bridge. Maybe, only the hanging bridge at Punaloor in Kerala had that effect on me when I was a child. I have not been to UP by train and so have not experienced the bridge by train. Shall do it the next time I am in Delhi
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Big Brother is watching, Indians
Who said going hi-tech means foolproof?
And has nobody told people here that exposing govt stupidity could land you in jail?
Read this then
Over the weekend, the Indian establishment demonstrated how bizarre the mix of political insecurity, intolerance to criticism, and sheer stupidity could be. Mumbai police arrested Hari K. Prasad, chief of Indian research and development firm Netindia, reports IANS.
The reason: Prasad is member of a team of security researchers, including American computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, who have been working to show that India's electronic voting machines (EVMs), like those in the US and elsewhere, are flawed, and can be hacked, altering election results.
In 2009, the Election Commission of India (ECI) publicly challenged Prasad to show that India's voting machines could be compromised. But incredibly, they did not give him access to a machine. Prasad's team managed to acquire an EVM from a source earlier this year, and soon proceeded to expose security flaws.
Prasad was arrested on August 21 for refusing to disclose the identity of the source from whom the EVM was secured for the tests. Halderman wrote in his blog that early Saturday morning, at 5:30 hrs, 10 police officers arrived at Prasad's home in Hyderabad. They questioned him until 8 a.m., then placed him under arrest and drove him to Mumbai, over 14 hours away by road.
Hari K. Prasad, J. Alex Halderman and Rop Gonggrijp have been working on an "independent scientific study of the security of India's EVMs". On the project's website at indiaevm.org, the team reports that the ECI has spoken of India's EVMs as "infallible and perfect".
Yet, similar machines used around the world have been shown to suffer from serious security problems. India's EVMs had never been subjected to credible independent research, says the site. An attacker with brief access to EVMs can tamper with votes and potentially change election outcomes.
This could be done two ways. One, by replacing parts of the machines with look-alike parts without the involvement of any local poll official. Two, by using portable hardware devices to change the vote records stored in the machines. The latter may involve local election officials, but still be undetected by national authorities or the EVM manufacturers.
In one experiment the team added a Bluetooth module, to be able to swing the EVM's votes wirelessly. The EVMs are "sealed by stickers, string, and red wax", which are hardly any barrier to an attacker.
The team also says that the EC-appointed expert committee, which certified the EVMs as secure comprised people with no apparent EVM security credentials, who did a superficial study based on presentations and site visits. Prasad's team worked with a real machine and demonstrated working attacks.
The team notes that real criminals would probably have less difficulty in accessing one or more of India's 1.4 million EVMs than this research team did. And the real criminals would not be working to inform the public about the security problems.
There are two ways to handle the scientific critic, or the messenger of bad news.
In July, in the world's premier security conference Defcon, security researcher Chris Paget demonstrated how easy it was, using $1,500 of equipment, to intercept GSM mobile phone calls. The US government and FCC could have arrested him. They did not. The demo has been taken as a wake-up call for telecom security.
On the other hand, in China, a critic who demonstrates that a government system is flawed will get an early morning visit from the police, and will likely disappear without a trace.
Are we getting dangerously close to the China model?
There is enough evidence from global research now that there are serious concerns about EVM security. The Netherlands, once fully onto EVMs, has switched back fully to paper ballots, and other nations are contemplating following suit.
It is past time for India to open up EVM security to serious scientific scrutiny, on an urgent basis. In the process, the ECI should apologise to Hari K. Prasad and his team, and appoint them as consultants in beefing us security for electronic voting.
If it does not do this, I have to suspect the ulterior motives of the Election Commission of India, which has been working so hard to suppress information about security flaws in its EVMs, rather than find out how to fix them. IANS
And has nobody told people here that exposing govt stupidity could land you in jail?
Read this then
Over the weekend, the Indian establishment demonstrated how bizarre the mix of political insecurity, intolerance to criticism, and sheer stupidity could be. Mumbai police arrested Hari K. Prasad, chief of Indian research and development firm Netindia, reports IANS.
The reason: Prasad is member of a team of security researchers, including American computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, who have been working to show that India's electronic voting machines (EVMs), like those in the US and elsewhere, are flawed, and can be hacked, altering election results.
In 2009, the Election Commission of India (ECI) publicly challenged Prasad to show that India's voting machines could be compromised. But incredibly, they did not give him access to a machine. Prasad's team managed to acquire an EVM from a source earlier this year, and soon proceeded to expose security flaws.
Prasad was arrested on August 21 for refusing to disclose the identity of the source from whom the EVM was secured for the tests. Halderman wrote in his blog that early Saturday morning, at 5:30 hrs, 10 police officers arrived at Prasad's home in Hyderabad. They questioned him until 8 a.m., then placed him under arrest and drove him to Mumbai, over 14 hours away by road.
Hari K. Prasad, J. Alex Halderman and Rop Gonggrijp have been working on an "independent scientific study of the security of India's EVMs". On the project's website at indiaevm.org, the team reports that the ECI has spoken of India's EVMs as "infallible and perfect".
Yet, similar machines used around the world have been shown to suffer from serious security problems. India's EVMs had never been subjected to credible independent research, says the site. An attacker with brief access to EVMs can tamper with votes and potentially change election outcomes.
This could be done two ways. One, by replacing parts of the machines with look-alike parts without the involvement of any local poll official. Two, by using portable hardware devices to change the vote records stored in the machines. The latter may involve local election officials, but still be undetected by national authorities or the EVM manufacturers.
In one experiment the team added a Bluetooth module, to be able to swing the EVM's votes wirelessly. The EVMs are "sealed by stickers, string, and red wax", which are hardly any barrier to an attacker.
The team also says that the EC-appointed expert committee, which certified the EVMs as secure comprised people with no apparent EVM security credentials, who did a superficial study based on presentations and site visits. Prasad's team worked with a real machine and demonstrated working attacks.
The team notes that real criminals would probably have less difficulty in accessing one or more of India's 1.4 million EVMs than this research team did. And the real criminals would not be working to inform the public about the security problems.
There are two ways to handle the scientific critic, or the messenger of bad news.
In July, in the world's premier security conference Defcon, security researcher Chris Paget demonstrated how easy it was, using $1,500 of equipment, to intercept GSM mobile phone calls. The US government and FCC could have arrested him. They did not. The demo has been taken as a wake-up call for telecom security.
On the other hand, in China, a critic who demonstrates that a government system is flawed will get an early morning visit from the police, and will likely disappear without a trace.
Are we getting dangerously close to the China model?
There is enough evidence from global research now that there are serious concerns about EVM security. The Netherlands, once fully onto EVMs, has switched back fully to paper ballots, and other nations are contemplating following suit.
It is past time for India to open up EVM security to serious scientific scrutiny, on an urgent basis. In the process, the ECI should apologise to Hari K. Prasad and his team, and appoint them as consultants in beefing us security for electronic voting.
If it does not do this, I have to suspect the ulterior motives of the Election Commission of India, which has been working so hard to suppress information about security flaws in its EVMs, rather than find out how to fix them. IANS
Sunday, July 18, 2010
It can happen only in India!
What start with dogs barking at some boys ended in two deaths, including that of a physically challenged girl.
In India's hierarchical society even an unsuspecting dog must have a caste. So it seemed when in Mirchpur village of Haryana, some dogs of low caste dwellings dared to bark at Jat boys. There was an angry backlash by the Jat boys and counter protests by the Dalit owners of the dogs.
To demonstrate their physical and social might, the Jats rallied around and attacked the Dalit dwellings, resulting in the death of two people, including one physically challenged girl.
The incident strained the sensibilities of Justice G S Singhvi of the Supreme Court who pointedly asked how "a dog of a Balmiki basti barking at a child become a cause of violence and murder of a physically challenged girl". "A dog could not have been killed on this ground. If that was the case then all the dogs would have been killed".
In India's hierarchical society even an unsuspecting dog must have a caste. So it seemed when in Mirchpur village of Haryana, some dogs of low caste dwellings dared to bark at Jat boys. There was an angry backlash by the Jat boys and counter protests by the Dalit owners of the dogs.
To demonstrate their physical and social might, the Jats rallied around and attacked the Dalit dwellings, resulting in the death of two people, including one physically challenged girl.
The incident strained the sensibilities of Justice G S Singhvi of the Supreme Court who pointedly asked how "a dog of a Balmiki basti barking at a child become a cause of violence and murder of a physically challenged girl". "A dog could not have been killed on this ground. If that was the case then all the dogs would have been killed".
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Russians spend the longest in queues every day
In my school days one joke on the erstwhile USSR went like this:
Tired of waiting in a queue for essential goods, one Russian swore that he is going to Palace to kill the President. Soon he returned. Asked why he came back so fast, he said, "There is an even longer queue outside the Kermlin."
The situation does not seem to have improved after Glasnost and Peristroika, according to a survey.
Russians spend an average of 27 minutes every day waiting in queues, longer than anywhere else in Europe. This statistic is mainly due to huge numbers of people at post offices and banks, a survey said. The study conducted in 18 countries examined queues in grocery stores, banks, post offices, drug stores, fast food restaurants, bus stops and train stations.
The poor show in Russia is also due to the fact that officials at places where people line up "never do anything to reduce the lines", Oksana Aulchenkova, head of Nextep company, which carried out the survey, was quoted as saying by The Moscow Times.
Tired of waiting in a queue for essential goods, one Russian swore that he is going to Palace to kill the President. Soon he returned. Asked why he came back so fast, he said, "There is an even longer queue outside the Kermlin."
The situation does not seem to have improved after Glasnost and Peristroika, according to a survey.
Russians spend an average of 27 minutes every day waiting in queues, longer than anywhere else in Europe. This statistic is mainly due to huge numbers of people at post offices and banks, a survey said. The study conducted in 18 countries examined queues in grocery stores, banks, post offices, drug stores, fast food restaurants, bus stops and train stations.
The poor show in Russia is also due to the fact that officials at places where people line up "never do anything to reduce the lines", Oksana Aulchenkova, head of Nextep company, which carried out the survey, was quoted as saying by The Moscow Times.
Monday, June 21, 2010
True Dravidian culture
When my wife and I made plans to shift to Chennai from Delhi and when she later moved to Tiruchirappalli, our friend K S Narayanan said, "Go lady, and imbibe true culture!" After spending seven years in Chennai and Tiruchirappalli we found that statement quite meaningful.
Have you heard the word Pandi mentioned while someone is referring to a Tamil? Then the one who said it must be a Malayali. And the tone would have been bordering on ridicule. Once, I too was part of the Malayali crowd mouthing that. Today I am wiser, having experienced the Tamil culture. The Tamils give you respect that you won't get in any other part of the country.
Even when we know the fact that Malayalam language evolved from Tamil or manipravalam, which was a mix of Malayalam and Tamil, why do we make fun of a people who have claim to one of the oldest civilisation in the Indian sub continent? The word Pandi must be a short form of Pandyan, one of the oldest Kingdoms in the country. The Pandyas of Southern India are believed to have been founded around five to six centuries before the Christian Era
While the Tamil language evolved in the third century BC, Sangam literature is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE, Malayalam had its origins in the ninth and tenth Centuries with remarkable development in philosophy, literature, education and the fine arts.
While the people of Kerala are losing their culture to other dominant ones, our neighbours have been able to preserve their culture, language and way of life. Go to Tanjore right in the middle of Tamil Nadu. It is the repository of rich culture that is quite Dravidian. The Big temple or Brihadeshwara temple is the right icon of true Dravidian culture. And the Srirangam temple of true Bhramanical order.
On the other hand, Malayalis are aping the westerners unabashedly. And the people of the state shares some of the psychological disorders of the Swedish or the Americans.
While I am not one for clinging to old ways of life, should we be so unabashedly materialistic?
Today, the great career for the Mallu is that of code cruncher. He/she is a churning out software to run the utilities and what not of Western nations. And, if you are not an IT professional earning in dollars, you haven't arrived. You dig?
Have you heard the word Pandi mentioned while someone is referring to a Tamil? Then the one who said it must be a Malayali. And the tone would have been bordering on ridicule. Once, I too was part of the Malayali crowd mouthing that. Today I am wiser, having experienced the Tamil culture. The Tamils give you respect that you won't get in any other part of the country.
Even when we know the fact that Malayalam language evolved from Tamil or manipravalam, which was a mix of Malayalam and Tamil, why do we make fun of a people who have claim to one of the oldest civilisation in the Indian sub continent? The word Pandi must be a short form of Pandyan, one of the oldest Kingdoms in the country. The Pandyas of Southern India are believed to have been founded around five to six centuries before the Christian Era
While the Tamil language evolved in the third century BC, Sangam literature is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE, Malayalam had its origins in the ninth and tenth Centuries with remarkable development in philosophy, literature, education and the fine arts.
While the people of Kerala are losing their culture to other dominant ones, our neighbours have been able to preserve their culture, language and way of life. Go to Tanjore right in the middle of Tamil Nadu. It is the repository of rich culture that is quite Dravidian. The Big temple or Brihadeshwara temple is the right icon of true Dravidian culture. And the Srirangam temple of true Bhramanical order.
On the other hand, Malayalis are aping the westerners unabashedly. And the people of the state shares some of the psychological disorders of the Swedish or the Americans.
While I am not one for clinging to old ways of life, should we be so unabashedly materialistic?
Today, the great career for the Mallu is that of code cruncher. He/she is a churning out software to run the utilities and what not of Western nations. And, if you are not an IT professional earning in dollars, you haven't arrived. You dig?
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Transport integration is the key
I now live in the commercial capital of Kerala, a city that I always wanted to live in as it is the only one in the state with a cosmopolitian charatcter.
It is bursting at its seams with overcrowded roads and traffic jam that extends to all its periphery. Even the byepass has not helped ease the situation in the city.
Personal vehicles have increased manifold over the years adding to the urban chaos. The congested roads are a nightmare when it starts raining. Monsoon is a fact that can't ever be wished away from Kerala. Rather than deal with it effectively, the city fathers sit over it and hope that the complaints would stop once the monsoon season is over. On the day it started pouring, I was out of town and came the next day to see a city with the main MG Road turned into an MG river.
I have often felt that what the city needs is integration of all its traffic infrastructure.
And I hope that the Metro Rail never comes for this small city.
A majority of the floating population in the city arrive by trains and leave by trains. Give the nature of the city, this is only bound to increase. The city has two railway stations, Ernakulam Junction and Ernakulam Town. While Junction (or South in local parlance) has two entrances, only the main entrance of Town station is approchable by big vehicles. A majority of the passangers arriving by trains either has to avail the auto rickshaw service or walk down to the bus stops about a km away.
It would be a big relief if the KSRTC authorities decide to have stops closer to both entrances of South railway station. In fact, that is how it is in major railway stations across the country. This would help cut down on number of autorickshaws running in the city.
It may not be yet possible to have a stop closer to the Town station.
Another major infrastructural development would be to move the state-run KSRTC bus stand closer to the South railway station. Infact both the bus station and railway station can be brought under the same roof if authorities will it.
Kochi has a huge waterbody that need to be put to better use. Until recently the boat services were in use. A major change needed is the introduction of modern boats and not the rickety ones that pass off as passenger boats. And better shelters need to be built at the jetties. Additionally, buses need to have a bay inside such jetties.
A common pass for trains, buses and boats would be of much help. This is working well in cities such as London and Singapore.
The Urban Transport Ministry has to work for a change. Instead of separate ministries working at cross purposes, we need to evolve a common unit to tackle the transport problems of this country. Instead of giving clearance to more car factories, the govt should get more bus factories to help solve the shortage of mass transport vehicles in Indian cities.
Even though I love to drive a car, I frequently take the bus in my city as I can have a relaxed journey!
It is bursting at its seams with overcrowded roads and traffic jam that extends to all its periphery. Even the byepass has not helped ease the situation in the city.
Personal vehicles have increased manifold over the years adding to the urban chaos. The congested roads are a nightmare when it starts raining. Monsoon is a fact that can't ever be wished away from Kerala. Rather than deal with it effectively, the city fathers sit over it and hope that the complaints would stop once the monsoon season is over. On the day it started pouring, I was out of town and came the next day to see a city with the main MG Road turned into an MG river.
I have often felt that what the city needs is integration of all its traffic infrastructure.
And I hope that the Metro Rail never comes for this small city.
A majority of the floating population in the city arrive by trains and leave by trains. Give the nature of the city, this is only bound to increase. The city has two railway stations, Ernakulam Junction and Ernakulam Town. While Junction (or South in local parlance) has two entrances, only the main entrance of Town station is approchable by big vehicles. A majority of the passangers arriving by trains either has to avail the auto rickshaw service or walk down to the bus stops about a km away.
It would be a big relief if the KSRTC authorities decide to have stops closer to both entrances of South railway station. In fact, that is how it is in major railway stations across the country. This would help cut down on number of autorickshaws running in the city.
It may not be yet possible to have a stop closer to the Town station.
Another major infrastructural development would be to move the state-run KSRTC bus stand closer to the South railway station. Infact both the bus station and railway station can be brought under the same roof if authorities will it.
Kochi has a huge waterbody that need to be put to better use. Until recently the boat services were in use. A major change needed is the introduction of modern boats and not the rickety ones that pass off as passenger boats. And better shelters need to be built at the jetties. Additionally, buses need to have a bay inside such jetties.
A common pass for trains, buses and boats would be of much help. This is working well in cities such as London and Singapore.
The Urban Transport Ministry has to work for a change. Instead of separate ministries working at cross purposes, we need to evolve a common unit to tackle the transport problems of this country. Instead of giving clearance to more car factories, the govt should get more bus factories to help solve the shortage of mass transport vehicles in Indian cities.
Even though I love to drive a car, I frequently take the bus in my city as I can have a relaxed journey!
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