Ashutosh Nilkanth’s Blog

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The Meritocratic Mind

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For decades, intelligence has been defined too narrowly. Either you are considered to be genius, or stupid, not just as a child but also in your adulthood. What’s more worrisome is that it can make most kids (and some adults) to deprave their own self-esteem.

Last week, I was reading an article titled ‘Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius‘, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that notes:

Aren’t there plenty of Ph.D.’s who can’t fix their cars? Sure, but the majority of them could learn if they were so inclined.
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Naturally, we must be careful to avoid the fallacy that some people deserve to live in poverty, or that entire groups of people are inherently inferior in regard to intelligence

After reading this article, strangely I didn’t find it funny in a separate news article that a bunch of homeless people could be discussing about “quantum physics and the splitting of atoms.”

What bothers me about the widespread perception of intelligence is that we consider all children to have equal abilities, and we force them into a path that may not be their’s to walk. An increasing number of such individuals are now living an unhappy life. Why? Because, you’d rather be a failure at something you enjoy, than a success at something you hate.

I’ve lived the larger part of my life in India, and I’ve realized that most children in the sub-continent are raised with the notion that they have to “choose a career”, which is foremost — financially lucrative. What that has evidently resulted in, is too many software engineers (I started out as one too, but out of my geekery), too many doctors, and well, too many politicians. All parents wish and seek the best in their kids, but high expectations are actually false expectations.

Even in the Western world, you are either “gifted” or “creative”. In reality, not all “gifted” kids grow up to be rocket scientists or brain surgeons. And as SWPL puts it:

Eventually they [creative kids] will show their creativity in their elaborate constructions of bongs and intimate knowledge different kinds of mushrooms and hash.

So who are the “intelligent” people anyways? I think that intelligence itself cannot be measured. College grades, IQ tests, ‘General Knowledge’, your job, income, or assets, are all poor indicators of intelligence. Intelligence dwells from enhancements in personal interests. The ability to learn, is, I suppose the most powerful ability in a being, more enriching than the six senses.

Looking at my 9 month old daughter’ affinity for sound, I’m sure she’ll grow up to be a great musician.

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In Touch With Augmented Reality

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I’ve been reading a lot about “Augmented Reality” lately. Just the other day, I saw this beautiful short film titled ‘World Builder‘, that also depicts this powerful holographic technology to express the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds.

Augmented Reality (AR) is basically the combination of real-world video imagery and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. The GE Smart Grid demo uses AR (must watch the video). It’s a fascinating technology, and I think it has a lot of potential in the consumer space as well.

Some startups (like Layar and Wikitude) are already developing AR geo-interfaces (GPS based) for mobile phones, which would allow anyone to simply point their phone camera in open space (say a market-place in a new city you are in), and get a location-based interactive perspective (say the landmarks, ATM’s, or pubs near you) through dynamic recognition.

Zugara’s Augmented Reality & Motion Capture Shopping Application (demo video) is also a neat example of things to come.

Nokia has also been building this technology on more than a decade of academic research into mobile AR. Nokia researchers have been working on real-time image-recognition algorithms as well; they hope the algorithms will eliminate the need for location sensors and improve their system’s accuracy and reliability.

One day, in the genuinely not so distant future we will live in two worlds; reality and augmented, neatly combined into one.

Further Reading:

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A Kirpan from Hoshiarpur

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I met Kuldeep about 6 months ago. It had just been a few months since he arrived in Melbourne. As we conversed, Kuldeep mentioned that he’s studying cookery at one of Melbourne’ lesser known universities. He didn’t like cooking much, but this particular course, expensive as it was, could help him in his Permanent Residency in Australia (since cookery and hospitality, among other trade skills like plumbing and hair-styling, are in demand in Australia).

I had been working late at work that Friday night. We were really gearing up for releasing a major update to a financial application. This project was critical, but, not because it catered to almost 7 million Australians for a net $80 billion. The real challenge was to deliver before time and within budget. Calling it a night, I walked down and hailed at a cab. A 20 something young guy greeted me, and we were off to my destination.

Ever since I came to Australia 5 years ago to study technology (of all things, of all places), I’ve fancied Melbourne. Let’s just say that I like the unpredictable weather here. Most people I’ve met, socially or professionally, have been friendly. My uni days were tough, but I had fun, and learnt a lot about myself. I enjoyed the casual dialogue with the cabbies (specially the philosophically comical conversations after those late drinking nights at the city pubs). These guys have stories to tell, and interesting viewpoints to share, many of which go unheard, apparently.

While we were still far away from the destination, the young cabbie anxiously asked me if I would pay cash or by card. I had a Cab-charge voucher in my wallet, but I left the choice of mode of payment to him. The neon clock in the cab was flashing ‘12:09 AM’, but the streets were still buzzing with traffic that mid-night. I was tired. And I didn’t really want to fuss over how to pay what I owe. To initiate a conversation, I asked him if he had been busy that night, to which he replied that he was hoping for business to pick-up before he finishes his shift at 9 in the morning. While I could never appreciate working late nights, be it the cabbies in Melbourne or call centre attendants in Delhi, but I realize that odd-hours are a norm at times to make a living.

I asked him where he was from. He looked at me with a friendly smile, and said “Punjab”. It seemed like he took pride in binding an ethnic bridge. “Where in Punjab?”, I asked, being familiar with the Northern states of India. “Hoshiarpur… and you?”, he replied, while keying some buttons on his radio console. “I’m from Delhi”, I said. We talked about our life outside India. I guess, at some level, we both didn’t want to chat about much else.

Breaking the odd silence in between, the young cabbie threw a candid question at me, “did you watch the footy game tonight?”. Perplexed for a few seconds, I told him the truth — that I’m not a huge footy fan, so I don’t follow the sport. I expected some sort of a balant reaction from him, for footy is a religion for many Oz sports fans. But wait a minute. My Indian friend has been in the land down-under only for a few months. How would this munda (young man) from Hoshiarpur know much about footy, when even some Oz baby boomers I know of dislike footy for it being too rough. “I support the Carlton Blues”, he affirmed, gazing in his rear-view mirror, “they’ve won 16 premiership titles, but they haven’t won since 1995. I’m hopeful for them.”

We were near the street corner close to my destination. “Myself Kuldeep”, he later introduced himself. As I was stepping down the front-seat, he handed me a Yellow Cabs business card with his mobile number scribbled on it. “Brother, call me anytime you or your friends need a cab”, he prompted professionally, before disappearing down the street.

I called Kuldeep on his mobile this Thursday, months since our rendezvous. Not to book a cab though. The business card he left, had already been through a machine wash in my trousers. Everything on the card had been erased, except his mobile phone number, scribbled in blue ink. For some strange reason, I was worried for my acquaintance. I kept the conversation short, although it took him a while to recollect our journey. “Are you and your friends doing fine?”, I inquired. We chatted for a few seconds, and I could sense that he was assuring me and reassuring himself for carrying a kirpan (dagger) now-a-days for his “personal safety”. Kuldeep sounded furious, “I pay my taxes. I even helped the Bushfire victims… why then is this happening with us?”

Amidst the recent events in metropolitan Australia, I’m worried for Kuldeep. International students like him, don’t need daggers, or hospital expenses from assaults. They spend large sums of money, unimaginable by the average Joe, to attain a quality education abroad. Moreover, this “invisible army” of workers deserves safety and equality. They aren’t menial to have silently contributed billions towards the Australian economy.

The news media may have given a xenophobic texture to the current situation, but I have bigger doubts — on the future of the so called multi-cultural society of Australia. The “White Australia” theme was gradually relaxed after World War II, when the slogan “Populate or Perish” expressed the national mood more acutely. Apparently, the crime rates lowered during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This time around, “curry bashing” may well provoke disparity with severe diplomatic consequences.

Today, the First-World President is an Afro-American, and yet I wonder if Kuldeep will continue driving a cab with “Victoria – The Place To Be” written on its license plate. The answer lies hidden somewhere in how well the Indian diaspora unites together at this hour.

Update (31 May) - Up to 2000 people (Indian and Australian) march through Melbourne CBD to raise awareness of ‘hate crimes’. Some images, courtesy Reuters.

Update (8 June) - We’re even more racist than Aussies: “Caste is India’s unique contribution to the lexicon of racial bigotry.”

Update (13 June) - Lifting the veil on our ingrained racism: “AUSTRALIA is a racist society. There, I’ve said it. I’ve wanted to say this for the past 24 years — from the time I arrived here.“

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The White Tiger of India

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Ready for another Slumdog Millionaire? After Vikas Swarup’s Q & A was made into Slumdog Millionaire by Danny Boyle, it’s the turn of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize winner The White Tiger. The book’s rights have been acquired by Revolutionary Road producer John Hart’s newly formed Smuggler Films.

I read through an interview with Aravind Adiga, and found some of his thoughts on the book’s development quite interesting. Some excerpts:

[The book] came out of my experience of coming back to India. I grew up in the south; but I returned to the north (Delhi), after having lived in Australia, and studied English literature at Columbia University in New York and Oxford University.

As a correspondent for Time, I traveled a lot in places I hadn’t seen before, like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar. The book is a record of a discovery of a new side of India.

The first thing that came to mind that I had forgotten was the servant-master relationship, the class system in India. Especially in north India, even today, a middle-class person is well off and can have three, four servants, a driver, a gardener, someone to take care of the children.

The other thing that struck me is the disparity in income. The rich are so rich. The Indian economy is booming but the money was not really getting down to the poor and the difference in the world between the rich and the poor was phenomenal.

And this led to the question why there was so little crime in India compared to that in New York, South Africa and Latin America, where poverty is the leading cause of [the high rates of] crime. In India, even if there is a phenomenal disparity in wealth there is very little crime due to poverty. The novel began as a kind of an experiment.

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Sun Among The Clouds

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Technology industry forecasts are an interesting exercise. I find it somewhat similar to “science fiction”, only that industry forecasts gauge a shorter capitalist term, and they are more analytical (less fiction for the Board of Directors, Investors, and Stakeholders).

Back in January this year, as part of an ongoing hacker^[1] community discussion at Hacker News, I made a forecast that “around 2009 Q3, the tech industry will be the first to recover from the downturn (before real-estate or auto).” That may seem unrealistic at the moment, although technology innovation and entrepreneurship is evolving. A recent NYTimes article also reaffirmed this trend, as many laid-off folks are doing startup’s, which is a great sign.

What I also predicted in that HN discussion was that “a new product/service will be released by Sun or IBM, that will gain major traction among the hacker community.” And that does seem to be taking shape, with the conjunction between two technology giants — IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems. IBM is in talks to buy Sun in a bid to add to their Web heft. It does make sense — in terms of their business and technology landscapes. But what surprises me is Sun’s new mantra of calling itself a “cloud computing” company. I feel it comes a little too late, from a company that was at the forefront of networking computing just a decade ago.

Will Sun be able to make a dent in the cloud computing space? I have my doubts. Not that Sun is technically incapable in any way, but I don’t think the business execs at Sun understand cloud computing from a hackers perspective. The real market for cloud computing is among the hacker community. Hacker’s build technology startup’s, and most modern-day technology startup’s need the power of cloud computing for on-demand scalability as part of their SaaS architecture. But hackers also need far more flexibility and assortment in their cloud computing architecture, which is generally not seen with high-end players like Sun. Pricing is another critical factor among the frugal hackers. Also, competing against the likes of Amazon (AWS) and Google (AppEngine) in the cloud computing space will not be all that easy for Sun. Sun can very well cater to Fortune 500 companies, some of whom already have a Web-enabled infrastructure equivalent to cloud computing, but AWS and AppEngine are already in the process of aligning better to the needs of the hacker community.

There’s a brighter side to Sun’s cloud computing strategy for startups though. As Stacey Higginbotham wrote at GigaOm:

Both IBM and Sun are working with startups to build out an open cloud computing platform to connect a variety of clouds, from Amazon’s to GoGrid’s to internal clouds. Sun is already working with RightScale and Zmanda to offer cloud services and management for its cloud and others. Clark outlined a similar strategy yesterday on behalf of IBM, and mentioned RightScale and Aptana, as other providers of the management layer for the cloud.

How this alliance between IBM and Sun shapes up, and how it might change the cloud computing space remains to be seen.

Update (10 April 2009): IBM withdraws offer for Sun Microsystems. Deal collapses.

Update (20 April 2009): Oracle acquires Sun.

Footnote [1] The term “hacker” generally raises eyebrows, as someone involved in computer security/insecurity. But, the term “hacker” also reflects a programmer subculture mainly notable for technology innovation and the open source movement.

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The Omelette Man

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There’s something rather allegorical about people who do just one small thing all their lives, but do it better than anyone else.

So bloody true. Whether it’s the Omelette Man, or the Joker, they both suffer from the same quality of being persistent. I’m humbled, when I come to think of it — they have a purpose.

You see, one fateful review in the Lonely Planet guidebook, mistakenly described him as an omelette shop, even though he had originally been making many foods. This review changed everything, and now he cracks open about 1000 eggs a day.

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143.5 Centimeters of Love

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I went to a train station today and learned that the distance between railway tracks is always 143.5 centimeters or 4 feet and 8.5 inches. Why this absurd measurement? I asked my girlfriend to find out and this is what she discovered. When they built the first train carriage, they used the same tools as they had for building horse-drawn carriages. And why that distance between the wheels on carriages? Because that was the width of the old roads along which the carriages had to travel. And who decided that roads should be that width? Well, suddenly we are plunged back into the distant past. It was the Romans, the first great road-builders, who decided to make their roads that width. And why? Because their war chariots were pulled by two horses, and when placed side by side, the horses they used at the time took up 143.5 centimeters.
Continue reading this entry »

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Coaching Through a Recession

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Have you ever met someone who has lost their job due to a recession? Did they have a family to support? A mortgage for their dream home to pay? Did it all make you any more cautious?

We realize for obvious, that during a recession there is a higher probability of wide-spread job cuts, which impacts household spending, and consumer demand, and manufacturing, and investment, and well, innovation. I’m no expert at global economics, so I would leave the grunts of a recession to the economists, but what really prompted me to write this rant is the blurry sociological outlook that comes with an economic downturn.

The question I asked a friend the other day was whether a recession triggers long-lasting behavioural changes in people, due to all the financial realignment during a recession? I wonder how an economic downturn affects the culture and lifestyle of an urban society in a longer run. Do we enjoy lavish dining during a period of recession? Are we as frantic about bigger Plasma TV’s? Does personal entertainment still call for vivid extravagances?

Over at Hacker News, a few months ago someone asked if anyone who lived through the Japanese price bubble of the 90’s would care to share their experiences? I felt, one of the responses in that discussion was an interesting allegory of sorts:

It was terrible. People were forced to eat raw fish for sustenance. They couldn’t get full-sized electronics, so they were forced to make tiny ones. Unable to afford proper entertainment, folks would make do by taking turns to get up and sing songs.

For some the sound of a recession springs fear due to the uncertainty ahead, for others it springs frugality as a way of course-correction. In our minds, a recession can also question our future aspirations and the life-style we wish to lead. I think, a recession is a perfect time to gather our thoughts together and answer some of these questions, because believe it or not, there will be more of these in a life-time.

As one of my senior colleagues mentioned to me during the the early 2000s recession, “I have started appreciating recessions… they give me an opportunity to change wilfully instead of forcefully.”

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Validation

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\Val`i*da”tion\, The act of giving validity.

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The Gaffe of Growing Organically

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No matter how good you are, don’t ever let them see you coming. That’s the gaffe my friend. You gotta keep yourself small. Innocuous. Be the little guy.

This quote from “The Devil’s Advocate” has stuck with me for a long time. In my view, it applies to a lot of daily matters — personal or business. It applies to startup’s and entrepreneurs, just as much it applies to living and happiness.

The gist of the matter is to “be small”, like an ant in an ant-farm (notice how most of the modern patterns originate from the works of nature). And most importantly, to grow organically. At the end of the day, we all are little economies. Never underestimate the revenue model. Even the best of ideas can die out, without any returns.