The Times of India Website headline on the very first page is about how Shah Rukh Khan is deeply offended about being interrogated at New York Airport because his surname matches that of many terrorists - "Khan".  Recently there was a similar furore about former president Abdul Kalam being frisked by Continental Airlines staff.

 

I tend to think that not only are these kind of issues entirely unworthy of front page coverage - they are also non - issues to begin with.  Its a reflection of deep disorder in our Indian Society : the fact that "social status" or "high income bracket" or a position of power causes a level of entitlement to those who have it to the extent of removing them from the clutches of law . That is why , in India , if one has enough money - you can get away with anything from murder to hit and run accidents.

 

The guard who decided to interrogate Shah Rukh Khan or the airline staff member who frisked Abdul Kalam - they were just doing their regular jobs . It's not as if they jailed the people in question. And yes Shah Rukh Khan does have a surname which matches that of many terrorists . So statistically there's a better probability of him being someone on the watch - list . Yes he is a hero for us  Indians and Indian diaspora , but why would an American security guard know or care about that ? He is just trying to do the best possible of keeping his country secure.

 

In fact in the US not even their own heroes are beyond the clutch of the law and that is what keeps the country ticking the way it does.  Of course some of their foreign policy is flawed or at least somewhat debatable , but by and large they've been very successful in building a modern and sophisticated democracy . 

 

And we should definitely not be telling other countries what their security guards should or should not do given the state of security in India -  rather its non existance.

 

I can understand uneducated people making gods or demi-gods out of heroes, leaders , actors or sportsmen but I find it somewhat troubling how even reasonably educated people like those who work in the media start making a fuss about things like this. The whole idea of making everybody function under the same set of rules and laws seems to shock us Indians. Maybe this is a new and morphed form of the age old caste system and the attitude it creates : that some people can get away with lots of things which others can't .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 I recently went and bought a Technic Set (8261) , and along with my Mindstorm set its amazing how good an outlet for creativity Lego can be when you're plain bored.  It helps to have a job, because I'm starting to realize that Robotics and Lego sets can turn into a pretty expensive addiction .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Its one of those times when I feel the urge to buy something and I do. This wasn't *THAT* hasty a purchase though its something I had in

mind for a long while and I finally went and bought it - a brand new bicycle which I can use around my home or on bike trails and paths

 which are in plently in the Redmond/Seattle area. Two months ago I had this urge to buy umm something bigger -- a car -- but good luck

prevailed and the sheer paperwork required to purchase a car ( which is something I really don't seem to require in Redmond ) turned

out to be better for my bank balance. I had a rented car for more than a month and after a few weeks of zapping up and down on the

freeway from Redmond to Seattle ( and a few aimless rides into the hills ) the excitement soon died out and it doesn't seem to be

worthwhile to buy at least for a while.

 

So here is my bike.

 

 

So this is my latest 'aquisition'. 

 

I took it on one of the trails quite close to where I stay, and it was quite an interesting cycle ride. For one,

I was riding a bike after ages. Next, it took me a while to figure out which of its 21 gears  I should be using

at any point of time. Third, it gave me a much more interesting view of Redmond than the cut and paste

repetitiveness of the surroundings which blaze past me during car/bus rides on the freeways.

 

 

 

 

 

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 !

 

This was a trip which was long due. And a ' homage ' which just had to be paid.  For here I had been in Seattle for more than 2 months now, and the least I could do was

to visit the Boeing Field/Museum of Flight to acknowledge the invention thanks to which I could be here, so many thousands of miles away from home - the airplane.

 

Its amazing to see the evolution of the modern day jetliner. Right from the bicycle-plane of the Wright brothers to the Propeller planes , and then to the Jumbo Jet and finally the supersonic Concorde.  Every time a new model of an airplane is rolled out its a wonder in itself. And a trip to the museum made me realize it.

 

Take for instance the 777. While flying to Seattle from Bombay, the first aircraft I boarded was an A300, the next ( for the trans-pacific trip) was a 777. All this while

I had hardly paid any attention to it and the uniqueness which had gone into its making. Yeah, it was just another twinjet aircraft , pretty big , that was it. All of a sudden

there was a whole lot more to it. It was the first aircraft to be designed purely on Computer using CAD/CAM provided by IBM. The first paperless-ly designed aircraft.

Which brings me back to my thoughts on what computing has done and what it could still do but that is another story altogether.

 

The first 747 - I have seen so many 747s and even travelled on them, but there was a special meaning in knowing that I was seeing the first 747. An aircraft which transformed peoples live,careers and probably entire cultures even maybe. An aircraft which dominates the concourses of every major international airport. Only when

you pick up the book '747' can you realize the pains which went into its making.

 

The concorde - this looks way too slender & smart , it was an absolute wonder of technolgy and its sad that it had to be put out of service.

 But somehow I felt a sense of far greater awe for the 747 since its made a much more visible impact on our lives today. And even as I make this statement there must be thousands of it up in the skies carrying people and cargo between nations and continents ; agents of a different kind of a world wide web which brought the world togther even when the Internet wasn't there .

 

 

 

 

 

When I moved from India to US in Late Septermber 2007, I wanted to have my cell phone connection working till the last day, so I thought I'd reach Seattle , login to my

online phone account, pay the last bill and apply for a disconnection.

When I did try to access my account, I tried an incorrect password, and before I knew it, the system had changed my password - and what was the way of communicating back to me about my changed password ? It sms-ed it back to me. Now sitting thousands of miles away from home how was I supposed to get an SMS? The password shouldve been emailed to me at least. I tried mailing the  hutch assistance email ID but obviously they;re too busy to reply ....

When I tried to login next time, it just said UserId disabled so I thought they had somehow figured out that my account needed to be deactivated.

I just got the good news that a 1900 Rs bill is due back home and the problem is not abt paying it ... its about how to pay it !!!

 

Its raining and pouring and beneath your tyres there seems to be no splashing.

Yeah sure there's no water. But there's ice.

 

This was the most important lesson I learnt yesterday after I rented a car for the first time.

 

It had been 2 months since I had last driven a car. That had been in the crowded streets of Meerut , the hyper busy Uttaranchal-Delhi highway which can be the best possible training in how erratic traffic can get.

 

I had to go some 15 miles away to rent a car. How I got there I just don't know. It was a combination of multiple bus rides, in multiple directions, foot-walks across lawns and parks, and a completly random arrival at the address of the rental agency. It was anything but the shortest path.

The renting-guy was in quite a hurry and handed me the keys to a Mitsubishi Lancer ( courtesy Microsoft) and I happily headed to the car. Automatic transition,which is supposed to make things really easy, but it took me a while to figure out how I had to get around to moving the stick, and like many troubles the solution was found by a phone call to a school friend :)  The absence of a clutch felt like a loss of control  though. It felt less like a car and more like a gokart.

 

Well I was in luck. For I was parked right next to the highway towards Redmond. So I just had to head back right.

Well it was just 6pm. There was a long evening and the night time ahead. And after all these ages , I had a car!

Maybe it would be fun to just head further off from Redmond , go for a 20-30 mile drive and head back after a while ?

The mind said *no* .  It was not the most sensible thing to do. Definitely not for someone who's used to driving in a place

which is so dry and barren as a desert that there's never been a drop of water disrupting the view thru the windshield.

And, on a cold rainy wintery Seattle night, when the roads are so slippery, and even the streetlights are goin off,you should be

heading home to bed. But the heart said *yeah* go ahead have a nice drive , In any case you've got to drive 15 miles to get

home, it really wont matter if u drive another 15-20 more for fun. I generally do what my mind tells me to and not the heart.

But this was an exception. Forbidden fruit is certainly the sweetest and a nice little drive on a high speed freeway was an

understandable temptation. 

And so I began my journey in the opposite direction. And it wasn't as straight a path as I had expected. So I made random

decisions at every fork and enjoyed my drive for a while. Till I realized that I was now pretty clueless about where I had reached.

Every fork/crossing/exit in this area looks pretty much similar so there's no concept of taking a note of 'landmarks' out here at

least not for a stranger. Yeah the wheels and brakes were slipping. The roads were slippery and sloping.

My journey paused for a while. Now I looked around the place. There were the Issaquah mountains on one

side. The mischief maker in my mind came back to work again.  I had come all this way. Might as well take a nice enjoyable drive

through the hills as well. Whether you're lost at Point-A or Point-B it really doesn't matter because lost is lost ... So might as well

remain lost for a while at Point-B instead of Point-A if it looks more interesting ? And so I started going up in the hills . And it started

to rain and pour. But there was no splashing under my tyres so I felt pretty ok. Till I saw the reason why. The roads were more white

than grey. And , a few hundred yards ahead of me, were a bunch of abandoned cars, with their wheels jammed in ice.

So it was obviously time to retreat. As I started my jourey 'homewards' , the streetlights were off , the traffic lights were off, and even I

was pretty much clueless about where I was heading. Anyways, after a little more aimless wandering in circles and spirals, stopping at

Gas stations,burger joints etc,and a total of a 40 mile journey for the 15 mile one which was required, I finally landed up where I needed to :)

 

Home sweet home and a good night's sleep ..... with the satisfaction of a random exploration (of a small part of) 

what the beautiful Pacific Northwest has to offer..............zzzzzzzzzzzz...........

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seattle as a city is quite facinating . 3 million people , and some of the world's greatest technology has come from this city. Right from Aircraft , to operating systems ... to  real time buying and selling systems (Boeing,Microsoft,Amazon...) and thousands of startups apart from this .  And the startups here do well.

In a cool/cold mountain-surrounded environment the brain, I'm sure functions better and more creatively.

 

Have been drawin up a list of museums to visit over the next couple of months. The museum of flight would be first on my list :) Before I got lost somewhere in the bits and bytes of the screen ur gazing at right now,  aviation was something which I really found facinating and I still do find it really interesting . If there's a wonder of engineering its the aircraft . I mean ... every calculation going into its making has to be so accurate, its so critical. Similarly the circuits and programs controlling every single part of it have to be so accurate .  Its not like a web service which can simple throw an exception , jot it down in the log file , and get away with it. Its a matter of life n death - a single slip would mean an air crash. On the code front ,what 've heard is that for every single line of code which controls the rudders/wings etc ... there are 55 levels of scrutinizing n testing .... anyways ... continuin with Seattle

Not too sure about this but its probably ranked as the best city to stay in the US. (Yeah sure therez a lot of rain ... ) Also what I find really cool is the fact that its

located right next to the pacific north west mountain ranges. 

The first impression I get from a city is from  its skyline , and the architecture.

This is probably the millionth time that a pic of the Space Needle is being posted on the Internet - but somehow it is so impressive that I feel it deserves one more tribute:)

And then again ... how can I forget to paste a pic of my new office .. Building 16 at Microsoft - the Office Business Platform Division

 

 

Friday Night . And what do I see . Or what do I think of .\

 

Fortunately or Unfortunately just one thing . I may sound like a complete drunkard as I write this . But today is one of the few Friday nights when not a single drop of Alcohol is flowing in my veins ... except for maybe the last week's session ... And the week before that ... and so on ...

 

Something looks very romantic about these pics ( See below ... ) . Beautiful bottles :) And even more beautiful content . With the power to make u visualize the most beautiful things :)

 

Anyways lets stop this crap . Another great weekend arrives . And this time , believe me it really feels great . After pushing thousands of lines of the crappiest possible code onto the production server . AND specially since it did not ( apparently ) ruin anything . As of now .

 

Anyways , I am really looking forward to the weekend . When the wanderer in me comes up , and I head somewhere out of the blue .

Anything , Anywhere ,Anythime . And I guess its really needed . From gulping beer on top Singhad fort at 3am in the night . Or getting bitten by mosquitoes in the IITB Boathouse next to the lake . Frankly spkin I myself would probably not have been so enthusiastic about this kinda stuff . Fortunately , I am gifted with some of the greatest ppl in the world as my frenz :)

And as the weekend will come to an end what will I start seeing again ??? an LCD Screen ... . Then come the 5 days when  the only thing I see eye-to-eye is a bloody LCD Screen . In the office . And then when I return home , again I invariably find nothin more simulating than ... another LCD screen ...  .

 

 

 

 This is the view from my office window. Nice , no doubt . And maybe somewhat similar to what people in urbanized places across the world  might find when they look at their city skylines and landscapes . Quite enchanting when you see it at least the first few times . Imposing towelike structures , reconstructions of some greek era , hills on one side , lake in the background .

But the biggest difference .. as compared to the snapshot of any other Indian city area is the surreal symmetry of the architecture .

Aligned . The style of the buildings is such that they just blend into each other . Giving the entire landscape a personality of its own .

 

Now - after 8 months - when I look through the same glass - things are different . I feel that maybe somethings missing . The Chaos .

The Disorder . 10 different buildings , 10 different styles . Each of a different height and color . Something like what exists on Marine Drive

and South Bombay . 20 floor mod looking hotels on one side . Grand buildings of the University campus close by . And some of those old

dilapidated British Raj ke time ki buildings which some folks are often so proud of ... and many of them exist only coz these guys want to preserve their 'heritage' and the 'charm' ... dude may i remind u the brits were not necessarily our heritage ..... :)

Anyways ... each of those has its own personality ............ and at times that seems a bit more interesting .