Recently I picked up 'The World is Flat' by Friedman.  Its about how he visits China , India and writes about how globalization is making different parts of the world pretty much similar. My concentration for some reason doesn't seem to permit me to read for more than 50 pages at a stretch - anyways most significant amongst the statments I read was : "Communism makes everybody equally poor." . And (with the little I have seen of Communism vs Capitalism) I remember West Bengal - every single time I arrived at Calcutta Railway Station, I saw a red flagged procession, and almost every part of the city was pretty much a wrecked, ramshackled place where every singe thing seemed to have entered a state of decay. West Bengal and its love for China, Russia and the inspiration it drew from them had made a conscious choice to remain detached from all economic progress. Contrast this with other areas in North,South and Western India. True, there is poverty in these places too, and the problems solved so far is far outnumbered by the problems they still face. But you can see the sheer energy there, in the form of IT Companies,Call centres offices n all. And I'm sure it trickles down to others too, given the number of hawkers , restraunts  and other small businesses which develop around the bigger ones. Certainly there is a disparity which can't be ignored, but then, wealth needs to be created before it can be spread. So the great hub of communism, West Bengal, has pretty much no future. To be honest people in that region seemed pretty non enterprising and lazy and maybe communism is an easy crutch for such people.  

Now coming to the Flattening ,, when I think of my workplace at Mumbai vs Microsoft, I can hardly think of a difference - the technology,infrastructure,communication etc.

Well true - I'm just talking about the Workplace at Mumbai - not mumbai as a city - the slums,the garbage etc. But the point is that at least such workplaces existed.

When I think of Bengal - except for my beloved Alma Mater- I find it hard to think of Bengal as anything but a big potholed ruin. And for the Cruel,Capitalistic society (as communists like to think of it) .... most corporations have huge giving campaigns,charitable functionaries etc and do way more for the world than communists ever will.

 

 

It was a surprise for me as I saw the early morning news flash and email about the 44.6 Billion being waved to Yahoo  to get themselves sold .

It was an even bigger shock as I saw the trading prices of Yahoo tick northwards by the second and by midday (Friday) it was selling a good 50%

above the previous day's close.  My infatuation for my precious internet stock portfolio (which was Yahooless) and my gratitude to them vanished

 immediately .. yeh dil maange more :)  When I was plannin my stock purchases .. who the hell would have thought of this sinking ship, just another

dot-gone to be company, the last of the dot com giants, eaten by the big bad GOOG . Well , the ship sank on top of a sunken treasure chest.

Good for Microsoft. But it will reduce some of the small little joys which I get in navigating to mail.yahoo.com just for the sake of entering a different

digital  territory  :)

 

For those who missed the boat to billionairedom and have yet to realize it:

YHOO, NYSE Closing Price on Thursday , $19

YHOO, NYSE Closing Price on Friday     , $29

 

 

 

When I was in college, one of the things I did with great enthusiasm was to pick up Core Java , through my own pet projects and programs.

In many ways it was really a foundation layer of what was to become my career & a cool intro the real world of software engineering . It

was object oriented, it was easy to come up with UI using Swing , and I didn't have to scratch my head too much for pointers . I had written

a lot of standalone C++ programs, but the thought of coming up with some worthwhile software in the unmanaged realm of C++ is something

 have yet to burn my fingers with. Java, with its JVM-managed-show, its easy to pinpoint errors by trailing thru the stacktraces . But for things

I love most, anything computationally intensive like image manipulation or anything intensive in number crunching, it just fails horribly when

it comes to speed. I'm not throwing out statistics in the milliseconds here because I've never really got to measuring that far, the time lag is

perveivably in seconds and even minutes - for image manipulation. I last worked in the software division of an investment bank, where a lot

of calculation intensive code was actually written in Java, and a lot of time was spent in trying to 'reduce latency' and reduce the time taken

for calculations. Maybe a lot of the problems could have been solved by not using Java. Even though it has been a kind of first love for me

over the last couple of years .

Anyways now coming to C# - I had get myself to learn it now that I was at Microsoft. Syntactically it was very similar to Java, so it didn't come

as a total shock to me. But I think the best thing was that I could really put to use the unsafe code structure for running things in an unmanaged

native environment with basic knowledge of pointers from C. So for boring things like UI stuff - I can normal C# Code , but wherever I need low

level access I just use unsafe code! Images which can't be processed in less than say 10 secs in Java can now be processed in the order of 100

milliseconds or so which is just great. When it comes to an image manipulation , even a 1024x640 image requires that many transitions between

 the managed environment and native code, which obviously takes a lot of time. Moral of the story : C# trurns out to be just great for me ->

don't need to make a transition to C++ altogether and I get the best of the both the worlds of Java and C !