Saturday, February 27, 2010

bal bal bachgaya

I am proud to say that I speak Hindi, which is our national language and I am more proud to say that Hindi is popular far away from India also; In South Africa, pickle is known as "Achar"! Words like chutney are found in oxford dictionaries. And words like Bangalored (this is not Hindi word but impact by a Hindu nation) have too much impact on this world!

But sometimes I get confused about Hindi! I don’t know how to use words! One of such word is “kal”! Does it mean yesterday or tomorrow? I remember a statement given by my previous manager about requirement implementation for new product “This client from India, always wants requirements yesterday!” I suspect it was misunderstanding of word “Kal”!

Another phrase “baal baal bach gaye”! I didn’t understand how it could be possible to save someone with two hairs!
I don’t think there is any actress in Bollywood who didn’t promote a shampoo or a soap which reduces hair-fall, hair damage,  gives strength to hair or nutrition to hair! (Certain record says, in India 48% new born babies had nutrition deficiency in 2005-06! ).Honestly till the time you don’t know the importance of this hair, you will never get to know what it is!

My Dad, whom I miss very much, used to make fun when he finds a hair in meals. And it was very common to see such incidents! Dad always said that mom’s food is tasty because of these hairs. And till today mom’s dishes are yummy and tasty. Yesterday I found a hair in Cadbury chocolate! Now I know the secret of Cadbury :)
I did saw a Kannada movie where actress caught actor being with another girl with a criminal clue! A long hair attached with his shirt, hmmm nope I think attached to baniyaan! That one hair changed whole movie, a great twist.
It happens to be a beautiful evening and I was with my girlfriend holding hands! I spent couple of hours with her in and around Forum and back to home with a melodious song achcha to hum chalte hai! After reaching home, on doorsteps, I was messaging her that I miss her hairs too much
“jaanu, tumhari Zulphe
jo mujhe har shampoo ki khushbu de
aur usse jude heroine ki yaad! ”

“What is this?” my cousin brother pointing to shirt even before I could remove my shoes.
My cousin brother is known for perfect dressing sense and being smart (off course not like me). He spends at least an hour a day in front of mirror and my mom always complain about this in two ways that I don’t see mirror at all and he is wasting lot of time with mirror! As usual I am confused to reply back to her.

Luckily my mom didn’t notice about his question as she is busy in cutting vegetables and sis busy on phone call. I gave a pale expression! Handed over a diary milk which was gifted by my girl friend (no doubt, purchased in my money!) and said to myself “aaj to main baal baal bach gaya!”

Few things can be felt! Unseen, unsaid, unbiased! Can be felt just for a moment! A moment equivalent to thickness of a bal!

Jai Hind!
Aaj, Kal aur AajKal,
AKA PC

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Crack Me If U 3-1-14

Cryptography - derived from the Greek kryptos, meaning hidden; the science of information security.

People who fall in love or people who hate books both know basics of this language very easily! I posted a 143 message in the news paper which can be understood to only one person; I was into 12th Std or PUC II that time :)

Chit preparation for tests/exams is another great piece of art :)

I did my primary/high school education in a district where exam is actually a combined effort of whole family. Big brothers are known to take big risks to jump off the compound and through answer chits. Intelligent brothers utilize their intelligence to identify readymade answers from MLQ (Most likely questions Bank) or guide books and obedient juniors making many copies of those answers (we didn’t have photo copier, popularly known as zerox machine). Parents will also contribute! Parents ensure that you sit in a exam hall which is convenient to send questions and receive answers and to choose a GOOD supervisor who can help in scoring. Well, none of these techniques need cryptography. It was only when I came to engineering I realized that cryptography is required as its individual effort that takes you high in engineering. Pitta, one of my friends is known to prepare small yet wonderful chits! I still read in news paper about new techniques and achievement of supervisor to recognize it. Well, if you are not caught you are not a thief! Innovation never stops in this category!

I got first crypt letter from my friend in 1998, when I was in eighth standard. Our postman kept that 15 paisa card with him for 3 days to understand what is written. Finally he delivered it to my dad even when it was addressed to me! We used very simple logic of understanding, replacing all alphabets by numbers and whole letter had only numbers! (Except the address, otherwise I could not receive it). I can write hello as 8-5-12-12-15, so simple yet encrypted.

Those who are fan of Dan Brown may know lot about crypt, krypton. The Da Vinci Code which starts with symbolism- ancient form of cryptography, had importance of Fibonacci numbers. I exchanged many letters with my potential girl friend in these coded forms. Even well known series prison break reveals different techniques to communicate symbolically. Obliviously I don’t want to disclose my techniques over here 

Too much involvement in anything is not good and this incident is an example.
          bldy bst idt htu
          asd scrdl . . . . .
I seldom get message from her. I read this message just two days prior to semester exam. I noted down and tried to crack it on the spot; I couldn’t solve it in net cafĂ©. Later I spent one full day. All permutations, combinations, all methods which we discussed; I even referred old letters to find a clue. Finally I got a Big Zero.I didn’t study cryptography as a subject till that day and I didn’t even know that such subject exists for study. At one corner I felt she just typed randomly, there was nothing to say. But my roommate who doesn’t even know the spelling of cryptography cracked this simple message! OMG! She used such bad words to shout on me? My roommate had good chance to use all those words on me :(

Don’t wanna bore much, below is one of such ciphered message! If you can crack then send a mail to this crack -> pramodchakravarti@gmail.com

Good luck !!!


283617 2837271859 581917151929, 283617 2837271859 581917151929,
283617 2837271859 581917151929, 5958 493827
3728, 171927 17593827 281938 463816461916, 47366719 281938 463816461916
283617 2837271859 581917151929, 5958 493827


PS: This is a clear message and no any bad words are used :) Also I hope I didnt do any mistake while encoding this message!

One clue: Whatever written above is in Hindi but english words. Just like I wrote Aaj, Kal air Aajkal :)

-PC

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

And it took three weeks to clean up the theatre

It was one of most beautiful evening and theatre was full of audience! The news of young hypnotist’s magic became wild fire and hundreds of people gathered to watch miracle.

She announced on stage ''Unlike most stage hypnotists who invite two or three people up onto the stage to be put into a trance, I intend to hypnotize each and every member of the audience.''


The excitement was almost electric as she withdrew a beautiful antique pocket watch from her coat.


''I want you each to keep your eye on this antique watch. It's a very special watch. Its been in my family for six generations. This is a sweet gift from my Dad''


She began to swing the watch gently back and forth while quietly chanting, ''Watch the watch , watch the watch, watch the watch.... ''.


The crowd became mesmerized as the watch swayed back and forth, light gleaming off its polished surface.


Hundreds of pairs of eyes followed the swaying watch, until suddenly the antique piece, watch slipped from the hypnotist's fingers and fell to the floor, breaking into a hundred pieces.














''Shit'' said the hypnotist.
And it took three weeks to clean up the theatre..

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Who is my competitor for tomorrow?

An interesting management article on future competition of IT industry from faculty member of IIM Bangalore
 ( Forwarded mail content)

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones. Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours). Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."
In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.!