Shrikant’s Blog

Stories of the American Experience

This creative group of high school students from Bismarck, North Dakota overcame the challenge of making personal and meaningful connections with historical events. They conducted interviews with war veterans in their own community, and then transformed their stories into powerful and emotional documentary called Stories of the American Experience. The documentary was a project in Social Studies class. The link implies it was produced on iMcc with the help of following software, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes. iDVD (optional)

I have been very happy with my BSNL DataOne broadband connection. Its always on and gives me 256Kbps performance in shared mode. I have also connected a wireless acess point and share it between two computers and the response so far (touch wood!) has been good. With lots of talk about private players launching all kinds of networks, the good old copper line seems to be the best bet for now and BSNL has 40 million of these. Plan is to deploy a million this financial year, a challenge where BSNL is its own competitor. The supply demand gap is so huge that they have an unchallenged run till 5 million lines. Wireless broadband does not have the scale that DSL has and cost economics largely in its favour.

Based on all the anecdotal input, BSNL is the best option available today. Some of my friends have tried out VSNL, Iqara, Dishnet etc and have not been satisfied. Number of my friends have deployed dataone in business and homes and are extremely satisfied. For now, BSNL continues to be the best devil around. For a company, whose officials took bribes to allot, deploy and keep the phone networks running, it has been a long ride tamed along the way by free market forces.

(via IHT) Somini Sengupta talks about Anupam who from Bihar’s lower middle class makes it to IIT. Anupam Kumar, 17, is the eldest son of a scooter-rickshaw driver. He lives in a three-room house made of bricks, mortar and a hot tinroof, where water rarely comes out of the tap and the electricity is off more often than on along a narrow unpaved alley here in one of India’s most destitute corners.

Anupam is good at math. He has taught himself practically everything he knows, and when he grows up he wants to investigate if there is life in outer space. He says he wants to work at NASA.

“It’s becoming very important to explore other planets because this planet is becoming too polluted,” he said with a deadly seriousness the other day.

Next door to his house, a family of pigs rifled through a pile of garbage on an empty lot. His mother, Sudha Devi, a savvy woman with a 6th grade education, cooled him gently with a palm-frond hand fan.

His father, Srikrishna Jaiswal, who made it through the 10th grade, flashed a slightly bemused smile at his son. “He has high-level aims,” he said.

“I’m not so concerned about reaching the peak,” Anupam clarified. “I’m more interested in doing something good for the world.”

For now, Anupam’s sole obsession is to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IIT, the elite network of 7 colleges established shortly after Indian independence in 1947 that produces tech wizards and corporate titans.

It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of getting into the institute. Of 198,059 Indians who took the rigorous admissions tests in 2005, 3,890 got in. That’s an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent. (Harvard University, by comparison, accepts 10 percent.)

Anupam does not know anyone who has attended the IIT. Nor do his parents.

But they all know this: If he makes it, it would change his family’s fortunes forever.

“I feel a lot of pressure,” he said. “It’s from inside.”

A voice in his head, he says, tells him he must do something to rescue his family from want – and that he must do it very soon. No wonder, then, that Anupam’s mother makes him wash his hair with henna, a traditional Indian hair-dying technique: At 17, he is going grey.

In Anupam’s story lies a glimpse of the aspirations of boys and girls in India today, a country that arguably offers greater opportunities than it did for their parents, but one that is also more competitive and a great deal more stressful.

More than half of India’s one billion people are under 25, and for all but the most privileged, adolescence in this country can be a Darwinian juggernaut. To be average, or even slightly above average, is to be left behind. Nowhere is that more true than here in Bihar, India’s iconic left-behind state, which makes the drive to get out all the more fierce.

“For average students, they have no scope,” said Anand Kumar, 33, who runs a one-man IIT-preparatory academy here. “The new generation feels more pressure than my generation. Nowadays, the competition is very tough.”

At 7 on a recent morning, with the sun already blistering, Kumar, drenched in sweat, drilled a gaggle of nearly 600 students, almost all of them boys, in calculus. “Find the domain of the following function,” he repeated into a scratchy microphone, as he inscribed an equation on the blackboard.

His young charges, packed tightly under a tin-roofed compound, all preparing for the IIT exam next spring, furiously scribbled in their notebooks.

Every week, Kumar tutors more than 2,000 youngsters, each paying just under $100 for a yearlong math session. Thirty others, the most gifted and neediest, he teaches for free, in an intensive seven-month course that includes room and board. He has received death threats – he suspects from competitors who resent his low fees – and one a recent day two policemen and two private guards stood sentry.

The intensity of competition can reveal itself in extreme ways. Kumar recalls how one of his neighbors, under enormous pressure from his family, failed the IIT entrance exam and took his own life; he was 18. One former student of his, the son of a poor peasant, sank into a crippling depression since failing the exam last year.

At home, the television could be blaring, the music could be on, the lights could have gone out, but Anupam would be studying, his father said. At family parties, Anupam would be found in a quiet corner, his head in a book. Relatives warned Sudha Devi: “He will go mad,” they told her.

Anupam’s education has been spotty, as it is for many in a country where public education is often in disarray. He enrolled in a small neighborhood private school, then a government school in 9th grade. But most days, like many children, he skipped school and studied at home. Every now and then, a math tutor, impressed by his gumption, gave him tips for free.

Anupam says he was drawn to the mysteries of space at age 9, after a television serial, called “Captain Vyom,” in which an astronaut ranges across outer space in pursuit of bad guys.

He recalls telling his mother about his interest in life in outer space, and he remembers her matter-of-fact encouragement: They haven’t discovered it yet, he recalls her saying, but you can explore.

“He says there’s something called research,” is how his mother describes it today. “He wants to be a research wallah.”

In the spring of 2004, studying by himself, Anupam failed the IIT entrance exam; it is virtually unheard of for anyone to make it on their own. Then, under Kumar’s tutelage, he devoted himself with the intensity of a monk.

On May 22, he took the exam again, six hours of math, chemistry, and physics.

On June 16, Anupam learned the results. He made it into IIT, with a rank of 2,299.

After he graduates and starts working, Anupam said, his first order of business would be to fix his house. He would like to install a proper roof. Then, dig a bore hole so water can be drawn right at home. As soon as possible, he said, he would like his father to stop driving a rickshaw.

The question that remains unanswered is what happens to the rest ? We need an economy that provides a future for not only those that get into IIT but excel in all professions. The new economy has a need for good lawyers, media, tourist guides, carpenters etc. They go through good training and provide a service that is the envy of the world. Output that raises the overall median of talent in every sector. Stay tuned as we find the root problem of bad service and transform.

(via Time) the coolest websites coverging blogs, news sites, shopping, food, entertainment. check it out >>>

(via Stanford) from the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

The other night, I was out at dinner with an old friend who works for General Motors in Detroit. We drove to dinner in his father’s Toyota Corolla. Since my student days in 1989, Corolla has been a best seller in the U.S. markets and gaining market share in the India market since a low profile and late entry. Wanted his take on why Toyota makes more money, real money in net profits than the big three, GM, Ford and Chrysler put together. A key point he noted was length of experience on small details of the car. For eg: the wiper designer will have 17+ years experience in designing wipers, more likely his first and only job. This way all the mistakes are accounted for, never repeated, designs continously improved. Unlike American companies somebody new is moved in the job every two years, so the experience starts from zero and mistakes repeated every time. The best expert management systems do not capture experience in the most perfect way or transfer it with minimal loss. The Toyota Corolla is not only an owners charm but also a mechanic’s dream car to repair. I remember a car mechanic in the U.S. telling me how much easier it was, to pull apart a Toyota and fix it, compared to Honda or any German or American Car.

When you compare Toyota with the Big Three automakers in the U.S. there’s a fundamental difference in the way they deal with their suppliers. The Big Three basically negotiate to the last penny. In particular, if a supplier succeeds in a process improvement that lowers costs, he knows darn well in one negotiation round that General Motors will come back and demand a price concession taking away that benefit. That gives that supplier a very powerful incentive not to share with anybody, least of all General Motors, what that process improvement was.

Toyota has a different philosophy. The company allows its suppliers to keep the benefits of their innovation, but it insists that that process improvement in technology is shared not just with Toyota but also with all the other component suppliers. As a result, you see among that population of 60 or 70 companies a rate of sharing ideas beyond what you see in the U.S. It has a cumulative effect over time of driving up productivity in the whole Toyota supply chain. Over a 30-year period, its productivity has gone up six times as much as in the U.S. system. I think that’s entirely because of the difference in philosophies. At a time when 50% of the cost of a car comes from outside components, and your suppliers are 600% more productive, that buys you one hell of an advantage — even if you give some of it back to them in price concessions.

When Toyota starts new plants it does copy exact of their plants. They also go to the extent of replicating verbatim organization structures with every new plant. So that a machine operator or any function has his or her equivalent in the plant that is being copied. This enables transfer of knowledge, experience sharing, or consultation on a person to person basis. Intel also does copy exact of their factories worldwide, but this Toyota practice sounded really simple but innovative. Finally, not a suprise that Toyota makes better cars but also more profits than most put togther. I have always believed good does not happen automatically.

On perfection someone commented, small things make perfection but perfection is no small thing.

(via Dan bricklin) The Russian software industry association, RUSSOFT, arranged for Gorbachev to give a speech on his yearly trip to the US that highlighted the increased cooperation between the US and Russia around IT. Their software association has a close relationship with the Massachusetts Software Council and chose their meeting as the venue. I personally admire Gorbachev for biting the bullet on communism in Russia, his views and work on preserving the environment and role model as a statesman.

Answering a question, as one who changed the world, what advice he’d give kids today who want to change the world, and he said, as I recall, to have a dialog with people, to help overcome prejudices and misunderstandings. In a toast he made before leaving he said that only monks and nuns do their thinking alone. We need to work together.

on globalization ….

We are in an era of globalization that spreads to all areas of life. Globalization has divided the world even more, and the gap between the rich and poor even in the developed countries has grown. This is a real challenge. Don’t blame globalization; it is an objective process that has developed over decades and centuries. It is all about governments. If we allow globalization to continue to be a blind process, then it will be Social Darwinism with “might makes right”, with the mighty getting all the benefits of globalization. The leaders back in the days of the end of the Cold War were hoping that the money saved by ending the Cold War would give money to overcome poverty and backwardness, but this has not happened. Those that broke through into the new technology, including China, Malaysia, and South Korea, did better, but much of the world is still living with great problems. If we try to solve the problems with force, with military means alone, we will not succeed. The blows dealt to terrorism’s infrastructure are good and right, but after that we should also think about people’s lives, education, technology, and what can we do in a global world. In a global world it is not the group interests, corporate interests, or national interests that should be primary, even though they exist, but rather universal human interests for all of mankind. The business community still thinks in terms of profit alone. But if you ignore the problems of poverty and backwardness, the result will be a situation that our children and grandchildren will be impossible to sustain. Let us think about future generations

On U.S. as the only super power. Lead with partnership not domination

The US is the only true super power now, with Russia transforming into a real democracy with modern economics. Some would like Russia to become part of the world economic community, but keep it suppressed for years to come out of fear that Russia could become a dangerous military power. But if you keep it an unequal partner while it becomes a free and democratic society which will take decades, then Russia will react badly. But Russia has worked through problems in the past and we should work with them with trust and say goodbye to old philosophies and look to work together.

Will the US leadership be by domination or by partnership? His experience convinces him that the model of leadership through domination and imposition will be rejected by the world. Leadership through partnership is what people throughout the world will accept and support. Not only in fighting terrorism, but also in other areas. A secure, just, democratic world order. A state of chaos will have no one feeling good. Russia was with the US on Sept. 11. There is no military solution. It is working together, addressing the challenges of terrorism, the environmental crisis, energy, and health. There are non-state unpredictable players. We live in a different world than we used to.

Balance development in both engineering and liberal arts for a balanced society

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