Not even a single post in more than a month is clear indication that I have been busy. I have been busy in traveling, doing shopping, reading, writing papers, making presentations, doing financial planning, shifting house, gaining weight.. and what not.

The long pending visit to Bihar happened during this period and it was really an experience. The bus journey from Patna to Muzaffarpur taught me many lessons and I want to sue Vodafone and kick their the ’son of b***’ which helps people in everything, right from finding forgotten ties to pasting ticket on envelopes, does not ensure connectivity on roaming even in big towns like Patna (I had the similar experience when I visited Pondicherry, Vodafone network not available there, though the town was painted red with Vodafone ads.). Bus drivers and conductors (probably the owners too) need some serious lessons on how to be more considerate and customer friendly, but I think this would never happen. First, the owners (the musclemen/politicians) do not give a damn about this and second, the victims are mostly the simple villagers who do not know whom to complain (most of them even do not know that they can complain against the ill treatment meted out by the bus conductors and staff) and there is no other options available. These bus conductors and their aides give a very differential treatment to passengers, the simple villagers and poor passengers are the constant victims of their aggression and bad language.

I have been on reading spree this year and have managed to read almost four books a month so far. Though last couple of weeks I have not been able to read much (but bought some good books so my anti-library is growing). Started this year with some non-fiction books and then went on to read four-five suspense thrillers and then again settled to some non-fiction/productive reading.

I read two contrasting articles revealing two different aspects of Indian education system, though most of us are quite aware of the indian education sceanrio, yet these articles made me ponder over them. The first article was a news clipping “36% of scientists at NASA are Indians: Govt survey” and the second one a cover story in  Outlook ” English Speaking Curse“.

As an Indian, I feel really proud looking at the figures quoted by D Purandeshwari, minister of state for HRD, in defence of the country’s higher education system and the state of research.

..as many as 12% scientists and 38% doctors in the US are Indians, and in NASA, 36% or almost 4 out of 10 scientists are Indians.
If that’s not proof enough of Indian scientific and corporate prowess, digest this: 34% employees at Microsoft, 28% at IBM, 17% at Intel and 13% at Xerox are Indians..

..number of PhD holders had gone up from 17,898 two years back to 18,730 last year. ..

If these number indicate the quality of ‘educational system’ in India (I am referring to quality of overall system not a few institutes like IITs and IIMs), we have all the reasons to be proud of, sadly this is not the case. These figures do tell story of Indians’ drive to excel, hardwork and dedication. It would be interesting to see how many of these scientists, engineers, researchers in these institutions are product of ‘only’ Indian education system and have not gone to pursue Masters and Ph.Ds at Ivy League institutions to make themselves more equipped and more ’saleable’.  Nobody doubts quality of Indian manpower and IIT/IIM entrance examinations act as screening procedure to get the best of the best talents from ‘the talented Indian manpower pool’.

A glance at the orginal quality research work published by faculty of Indian universities and instiutions will give you the real picture. We are way behind. Hmm.. I am dreaming of the day when an Indian institute will produce a noble laureate in science or economics. 

The Outlook Cover Story ” The Torment of English” depicts the plight of a major section of students striving to be proficient in Engish and the poor quality of faculty and course curricula to teach English as Second Language. ‘Benchmarking’ and ‘Standardization’ are two key aspects of quality. And the following excerpts from an email sent to Outlook magazine from a student who got 100 per cent marks in English in CBSE Examination tells the real story.

It all depends on how one pen down the ideas.. the flow in the language helped me fetched marks…

… Don’t use harsh words, keep the language simple, short and yet so crispy.. do not get deviate from the topic…

And have a look at the job application submitted by an M.A.

“With profound veneration, I implore to ejaculate before you the following few lines for favour of your kind consideration. I am MA and having 12  years experience in concerning field.”

Here is another one .. a PhD Student in an English communication class at an IIT –

“Although the freedom of thought is most- important but it is not or easy as it sound…When express different opinion. If we refused -to other people to hold there opinion on religion or politics. The process is impossible.”

Mrs. D Purandeshwari, do you see something here? You have got a herculean task cut out for you.

UPDATE

The figures quoted by Mrs. D Purandeshwari are absolute bulls*** and taken from chain-spam mails. Now, I think I need not  write about the quality of our bureaucracy and lethargy/stupidity of our minister for quoting such baseless figures in parliament.

(Picture and excerpts.. coursey Outlook)

Part 1, Part 2

The most beautiful experience of this one week long trip was visit to Bhedaghat. It was fantastic. Since I am not very positive about my skills to capture the beauty of the place in words, I ‘ll let the pictures do the work. It was really an exhilarating experience to do boating here. You can guess that from the pictures. Just imagine clean and sparkling stream of water flowing through mountains of marble.

Bhedaghat is just half an hour drive from Jabalpur town and the drive too, is quite pleasing experience. Nice roads, beautiful trees on both side of roads (a few speed breakers which you might miss if you are too lost in beauty of the surrounding..).

We hired a shared boat at Rs. 30 each for almost an hour long boating (You can get individual boat for Rs. 300, we thought that option decided against as we were pressed with time and the guy who was supposed to own the boat or offered us the individual boat, was in inebriated state.)

The boating package comes with a free guide, who will explain  all about the place and details worth knowing, rhyming all the way. You will enjoy if you understand Hindi. Someone must have spent quite sometime writing those rhymes.  We came to know that movie Ashoka (an SRK, Kareena Starrer), some Sunil Dutt starre dacoit movies were shot there and how the stunt scene were picturised.

This place seems to get good foot fall of domestic tourist and is quite clean and well managed. (Honest opinion here, though I have been given enough warnings and reminders to see all the things properly and not register only the negatives, allegedly I did that in my Kanha Trip. But this place is really nice. )

Near to this place only, we visited an ancient temple “Chousath Yogini ka Mandir”.   This (10th Century A.D. ) temple has around 80 images of Brahminical Godesses, sadly most of these images were disfigured during different invasion, though there are still some intact images. These images are enough to give you a glimpse of our rich heritage and make you wonder about thier highly developed artisitic skills.

I never liked crowded places but luckily this place was atypical of normal Indian Temples. Visitors were trickling but this place was very calm and can make  any one willing, to go in  meditative trance.

This place is also famous for its marble carvings and artifacts, there are numerous big as well as small shops selling beautiful carvings and statue made out of different type of marbles. I wanted to buy a beautiful elephant statue  but its weight made me go agianst it. I decided buy it later.  (Surprisingly, I got a miniature version of the same statue, gifted by IIT Chennai as memento, when I visited IIT last week.)

We were running out of time and we wanted to visit Dhuandhar water fall at any cost. So we rushed there and reached  just before the sunset. And, the view was awesome. They have recently started a ropeway and the view from the ropeway is mesmerizing. Do not miss the ropeway ride. I badly wanted a Digital SLR to capture some pics of the sunset there. Probably, I should plan to buy one.You can see some pics here captured by my ‘chhotu’ camera. 

http://santosh.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/amidst-water-mountains-temples-friends-and-dreams-part-1/ 

Since it was not only a fun trip, we had to accomodate the other planned activities for FDS. So our next stop was at Bhopal to meet some Profs at our alma mater and others. Though we had planned to spend only a couple of hours and then return to Jabalpur, but once you are in the campus (and it is not any campus, it is the beautiful IIFM Campus, everypart of this campus reminds me of the wonderful time I had here. Sheer Bliss.)

We spent considerable time, dicsussing many things with Profs, sharing the our concerns about IIFM, talking to juniors and and the visit was earlier planned as 3-4 visits became a two day visit to IIFM. It was nice to know some welcome changes at IIFM.  

We explored Bhopal for some shopping malls, so that we can buy wedding gifts for one of our batchmate, unfortunately (or fortunately?) Bhopal seems yet to get its share of shopping malls. We could not find any shopping malls in Bhopal. Finally we decided to gift ‘Gift Coupons’ and managed to get them from ‘Raymonds’ and ‘Fab India’. It seems that our batch has created some kind of record as there were as many as 8-10 batchmates (8-10 batchmates, 6-7 marriages) got married within a span of 2 months.

By the way, while I was late in updating my blog, Akhand updated his blog about our Jabalpur trip. Though the way I have been described there, I could only imagine to be like that.

After a lot of procrastination, finally I decided to take a break and finish some long pending tasks and spend some time with friends. Let me confess, whenever I see an opportunity to visit Madhya Pradesh, I just grab it with the illogical roguish pleasure, but this was a more planned and structured tour and I expected it to be quite productive considering the amount of time, planning and resources have gone into it.

Earlier I had heard a lot about Jabalpur from my friends and knew that somewhere there is a place called Jabalpur since my childhood radio days (Jabalpur Radio Station used to play popular hindi music. It was surprising that I was able to catch the AM band frequencies almost 300-500 kms away.). But once I stepped into IIFM, I became more familiar to this place and after Akhand was placed there, it was almost certain that I am going to make a trip to this place. And, it happened last week.

I reached Jabalpur by train from Itarasi (boarded AC 2 Tier with General Ticket and paid fine to get legal rights. I got a pleasant surprise in form of an honest Travel Ticket Examiner, who did not charge extra for giving me a berth.) and from Jabalpur Station to my friend’s place riding pillion on his bike. (I must confess that I committed the sin of not complementing him on his slimmer look.). It was midnight so I could not make much of half hour journey from Station to his apartment. It was a newly acquired  unfurnished, ideal for any vouyer, fifth floor apartment in locality inhabitated by some very good nubile faces ( just guessing.. could not see that clear from the fifth floor) and potent of making you feel jelaous if you live in one-two room apartments in metros.

After having home cooked dinner (at 1 am) , I realized how living single/alone makes you better skilled in cooking, organizing things and procrastinating. The following morning , reversed the aversion (developed thanks to IIFM mess cooked Poha’s,) for Pohas. Surely, I had the best Poha of my life there.

Moving in and around town made me feel that Jabalpur has quite nice and well managed with clean roads but it was not the normal case. The city hosted the Investors’ Meet just a few weeks ago and the city administration made a point to attract investors with good window dressing. Though Jabalpur seems to be better managed and cleaner than many similar district towns I have been in UP, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. 

Akhand though quite a new resident of that city did a good job to explain many facets of the people and places,  he made a nice segue to be followed by native of that place and ever enthusiastic friend of ours to explain more about the city and plan for site seeing.

We spent quite some time brainstorming for the workplan and did quite well to jot down some concrete ideas and I took all the opportunities (whenever we met some people regarding the workplan)  to showcase our zeal, enthusiasm and symptoms of my chronic verbal diahorrea, which keeps on resurfacing every now and then.

So far we have not gone to see the most beautiful place in Jabalapur Bhedaghat and Dhuandhar waterfall.  But very soon, I was to capture the beauty of the third tourist spot of Madhya Pradesh after Panchamarhi and Kanha National Park.

What are the traits and factors which decide whether somebody is going to be an entrepreneur or not? Are there some factors/traits which are more important than other for being a successful entrepreneur?

A research paper by a team of researchers from The World Bank, CEPR and CEFIR, provides good insight on above question on the basis of data collected on 400 random Brazilian Entrepreneurs.

Some interesting findings from the paper:

• Brazilian entrepreneurs are coming more from rural areas than urban areas and they are more likely to be married and less likely to be overweight. They are taller by one cm (approx) than non entrepreneurs.
• Entrepreneurs were more patient than non-entrepreneurs and they expect lower returns on their investment than non-entrepreneurs (18% against 24% expected by non entrepreneurs).
• Entrepreneurs put more value on children’s education than non-entrepreneurs.
• Entrepreneurs show more trust than failed entrepreneurs do.
• Exploring the sociological characteristics of entrepreneurs, the paper shows that entrepreneurs are more likely to come from a family of senior managers, officials than workers. They also have more relatives and friends running their own business compared to non-entrepreneurs have. Though the social network has some role in deciding whether one is going to be an entrepreneur, but does not affect whether one is going to be successful entrepreneur.
• Entrepreneurs are also more likely to come from a large family.
• Mother’s education seems to have some impact on entrepreneur’s success. The mothers of failed entrepreneurs were less highly educated than the mother of entrepreneurs.

I do not know to what extent we can generalize the findings of this report, but surely it makes an interesting read.

A couple of days ago, I, along with my colleague, was at one of pizza joints in Chennai to have dinner. When we reached there, I spotted an old person coming towards us with a bag of Incense Sticks packets. I just ignored him and moved away, I do it most of the times in Chennai as I do not know Tamil and my experience of interacting with Auto-rickshaw drivers tells me avoid interaction with anyone in Tamil, unless it is inevitable. Certainly, this was not in that category. I went directly to the Pizza joint. A few minutes later, my colleague joined me (she was making payment to the Auto-rickshaw driver), she was carrying a pack of Incense Sticks. I looked at her bemused. She sensed it.

She told ” Didn’t you hear what that man was saying?”

The expression in my eyes conveyed to her ” How could I.. I do not know Tamil.”

” He was saying in Hindi that he had nothing to eat and if I can buy…..so I bought one pack, though I have more than enough supply of incense sticks at home.”

Two things, he was speaking Hindi (our mother tongue) and he was not begging directly. His face flashed in front of my eyes. He was different, he did not pursue us for long. He did tell something twice, but I was too engrossed and pre-occupied . He might be a genuine person in need.

By that time, the menu was open in front of me, and I placed order for two pizzas, pasta and Coke. Both pizzas seem tempting on menu, so wanted to taste each of them. Surely too much for two of us, as the other person has already declared that she was not going to eat much.

After half an hour, we gave up. No. Cannot eat more. Two pieces of pizza of still left on table. Half of the pasta unfinished. I asked for bill. Rs. 560. I put six hundred rupee notes and we walked out of the restaurant. Forty rupees, tip.

After coming out of the restaurant I looked around, the man (Incense Sticks Seller) had been here only. But he was not there. He must have gone for dinner.

I looked at the incense stick pack which was with me in my laptop bag, Rs. 20, yes It was not of more than that. His margin would have been 4-5 rupees. Dinner in 4-5 rupees? He was saying that he had nothing to eat.

Must be lying or he must have had sold some more packets. But how many, he was carrying not more than 20 packets.

Some thoughts sprang in mind. I did my best to ignore them. But now, the pizza and the pasta were anything but delicious.

Though I could not read as much as I did last year, and left many book half finished, or just untouched on the shelf. These are books I did manage to finish, apart from the compulsory reading required by my job.

Fiction

• Alchemy of Desire by Tarun Tejpal
• Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille
• The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• The Innocent Men by John Grisham
• The Broker by John Grisham
• The Last Song of Dusk by Sidhart D. Sanghvi

Non-Fiction

• Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner
• The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
• The Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid by C K Prahalad
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
• The way of the Sufi by Idries Shah

I bought several books last year and many of them are still waiting to be finished. I read a few pages and somehow could not finish them. Hope to finish them soon this year.

Half Read / Unfinished Books

• Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Cuckold by K Nagarkar
• The Moral Mind by Marc Hauser
• Foucault’s Pendulam by Umberto Eco

Let see how much time I get this year to satiate my desire to read. Getting Thinds Done by David Allen and The Perfect Mess by E Abrahamson and D Freedman are the two books which I am finishing this month. Two books advocating completely contrasting approach to manage your worklife.

“There is a reason why cleaning sewage pipes, wiping one’s rectal orifice and playing cricket in Australia can all be referred to as “attending to things down under”.

Nothing can describe it better. Read the excellent post by Greatbong here.. (This is a must read post from one of my favorite bloggers.).

I was looking for a good thriller to engage myself and just going by the blurbs picked The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne. “The biggest challenger to Dan Brown’s crown” by the British newspaper The Mirror. And after reading the book, I concur with The Mirror. Really one of the best thrillers I have read lately.

When I pick a thriller, I expect it to make me finish in one go, make me glued to the last page and tempt me to go to the last pages to find out the truth. This one fits exactly. The novel belongs to ‘The DaVinci Code’ genre and Sam Bourne convincingly uses ‘codes’ ‘cabals’ ‘conspiracy’ and ‘Christ’ to make ‘The Righteous Men’ and a cash cow for publisher and author.

‘The Righteous Men’ is based on the jewish folklore ‘The Righteous Men’, which says that world is safe because of the noble acts of 36 righteous men and killing of these 36 men would lead to destruction of world. The Chruch of Reborn Jesus wants to remove these 36  men to facilitate the Second Coming of Jesus.

Though like, The DaVinci Code, this too disappoints towards the end (you can easily figure out what is going to happen), but it is a good read. Anyone who has enjoyed The DaVinci Code, would love this as well.