WiCamp Gurgaon: The theme revolved around inovation, with what the big guys have done to become big, and what they do to remain big. The buzz words were: innovation, creativity, efficiency…

A great start, with me being slightly late thanks to the ‘awesome’ number allocation of plots at Udyog Vihar.

The start was from Shailesh Mehta, he being the one who has hit the road, with the aim of becoming the next door Google by deeper penetration into our local ecosystem. A Search engine for providing the local search, this would be a content distributor along with being a content creator. The concept of providing a space for users to write their reviews, might actually help in making the search better, and more intuitive. Although there are several other players in the market, the claim stood that it is the user community will make the venture perform better in the market in due course of time.check this link out at: http://www.onyomo.com/ they call it ‘on your move‘ <- personal note: I have used Sulekha for long, thinking of trying my luck on each of them(got something to work on over the week-end ;)- >

This whole thing seemed just like another lecture untill David from The Innovation WorkGroup came up and organized the group into a single discussion. Now is what we call ‘the shape for discussion’. It was only then that the minds began to think and mouths began to pour.

Next on the list: Two individuals have finally removed the N from non reliable indians NRI and have come back to their nation, to fill colours of prosperity with their venture called RangDe.org, these were Smita Ram and Ram NK. A cool name inspired by the bollywood block buster hit Rang De Basanti - RDB. A peer2peer non-profit micro-finance company with the aim of providing small amounts in the multiples of 1000 to the needy. The deviation from the normal track has been to promote women of the villages as money lenders. The philosophy driving them is: ‘women are more proactive in returning the investment’, I would add ‘more often’ and make is more subtle for the men. So they often lend money to the women which in turn shall distribute it further. A great awakener for us as youngsters who have put their benchmarks for life as packages, in Rs. a.k.a $ ,  and not as ‘change’ in the society a.k.a innovation. My fi’e for the couple for this social innovation

The brain storming session comprised of loads of statements of what innovation is and what is means to companies big and small. I for innovation and innovation for I, a quote by Pavan from Wipro provoked each one of us. The adrenaline for innovation comes from the need for it. The need in the individual to get recognition. The need for the company to earn more. The need creates and the need drives. The thought was opened by Anand from Wipro and towards the end it was unanimously agreed upon. I would like to add, that for eras man has innovated to improve his way of living, and is constantly doing just that. <–(boring though, try something new. something which is just the opposite. like much more of bioweapons, missiles….)–>. Dissatisfaction for the current situation,mentions a need for change and a change is innovation. And as a lady mentioned it can either sustaining or a breakthrough innovation.

The debate between creativity and efficiency was the one I loved more. We believe that both efficiency and creativity need to go hand in hand for a organization to survive. I concluded with the mention that: creativity is a galloping horse, with the reigns of efficiency controlling it. The rider falls off due to  bad ROI (Return on Investment) if the efficiency levels are not reached.

Big-brotherly treatment of the bosses are great killers of innovation, cited with an example of the man who proposed first aid kits for Maruti cars back in 1980’s was suppressed for the idea.Today he has a venture which supplies these kits to several auto mobile manufacturers, mentioned Pavan from Wipro. Illiteracy was cited as another good cause. But it was the society which was killing it much before it ould mushroom out. and was killing it for good, said a gentleman. Since birth we are asked to act Good, a Good son, a Good brother, a good husband (daughter, sister, wife). And we are asked to be on the track, and if we just walk on the track, we folllow. By following there is no new track, no innovation. A great conclusion indeed.

I just forgot to mention the new media devices from Vmedia which might as be a great way to watch movies. These are blue-ray optical disks smaller than a credit card, perhaps the smallest optical drive. And this drive fits nicely into an mobile phone. Plug in and Plug out into a HD experience with the latest blockbusters on the move. This was Anuraj from Vmedia.

Innovation was becoming such a cliche in these 4 hours. with all these high end statements. I found this last real life narration quite joyous. A node-netwrok was setup in a matter of 5 months at this engineering Institute, by few IIIrd year students with old computers (PI, PII and 386’s) along with old hubs and switches. Linux was the savior of these garbage boxes, who saw the light of the day in a ’server’ room. The room soon became a high profile dare-not-enter area, mentioned Sanat from IIT Delhi

It was filled with old junk and great minds, ‘beware we bite’

Lalu Prasad Yadav has been known for his prowness at work. He seems like a wicked mind under a thick skinned dumb exterior. From kullhars for drinking chai inside the trains to maximizing space utilization at railway stations, he has shown his unpredictable behaviour. The idea of setting up 24 hour restraunts at railway stations of major cities of India seems like a novel thought. With the aim of space utilization, money generation and facilitation of good food at cheap prices, comesum s have hit the market serving food at night real hard. Whether it is kadai paneer to pizza, and gulab jamun to milk shakes all is available under one roof. What else do you wish for at 3 am !

I have been visiting comesum for couple of years now, it seems like a great outing, when you have spent the night wacking your brains on some project. With each visit I have witnessed a change in the crowd. From a destination for night train travellers to a good-snack-cafe for call center employees and now as an after disc hang out for youngsters, the transition seems little too drastic.

Earlier, I seldom used to find any one properly dressed. With people in their night chaddies with a T-shirt on top or with a pair of shabby jeans it seems like a cool-cool place. But now its seems, Sun never sets at ‘comesum’, its hot in here. Wearing shades at 3 AM seems a possibility here. Its now filled with yankies with minnies and halters and yunkies as Men in BLACK. Its a hot place to be. Surely ,being a witness to this drama at 3 AM is worth the travel.

After all its only the pizza that drove me to nizzamudin tonight, with a smile on my face, and pity for Lalu I return to my cozy home.

Little did Lalu know that his ‘milking’ restraunt shall serve as a hang out for hang overs.

The morning of 28th started with a bang, the tussle of making the right kinda document with Acrobat Pro. Its a really tough job getting it in the way you want it to be, in just the first shot. After the task was some what handled, it was time to leave for gurgaon- the IT mainland of North India.

After some six hours of traveling from one corner of Gurgaon to the other to wind off the work, it was time to wait at the City Centre. The Wait was an experience of not being part of the war.

At 5:30 pm, a war was on, a tussle is on, in each one of the souls who have left their office to go back to their home. A tussle to fight for their own existence, to gather space, that they could call their own. It was the time when they had to forget about the worries of their office, as it was the dawn of a new set of problems. The problems of their own homes.

It seemed all these beings were lost in their own thoughts. For them smiling at a passerby seemed merely a waste of time.

The swarms of cabs had arrived, people rushing to settle in their own. The irony was that all of them were in a hurry to get relaxed. They wanted to get into their cars and sit, waiting for the others to come. Please some one tell me is waiting what you do to relax(I am very Impatient). Meanwhile, each  one spent their time looking out of the window, mesmerized in own thoughts. The idea of talking to their fellow passenger seemed another job to them. ‘Talking’ surely is an effort, especially when you have to get a false smile on one’s face, when you are yourself low.

I could visualize my self on top of a building, when all these cars would seem like ants and these humans like food. The ants would come, swallow these beings, and set off for their way.

At the Toll Gate, I was a witness to the perspective of these ants going through a narrow channel out into an urban jungle.

Even tragedy at road, would have moved a few, while others would mostly pouring out their emotions blaming the situation as a mere time waste. (Read more…)

Its been quite a lotta time, since I last visited my own blog. I was opening it only when I got a mail saying, hey you a got a new comment. But these were all spam, filling up my mailbox each day. Finally I thought, I should get rid of all this mess. Finally got the courage and configured akismet- a spam filter for wordpress ( the tool on which my blog works ) .

My site looked old and bland. see right…———————————–>>>>>

Indeed an overhaul was required, thus I fetched a new copy of wordpress.. 2.51(current version), and put it on. Now the first thing to be done was to get hold of all the old posts (though very less in number). Here google served as a saviour and I got hold of a plugin called ‘wp-migrate‘, which let me export all the posts along with comments. Using this feature, I could have migrated to a drupal or joomla or any tool  for that matter. But I have left that for the next time.

Damn it took me 2 days to fix this new thing, which should ideally take 5 minutes, it gets messy (just when u open an editor to tweak with html or php). You wouldnt know when time flies. I have used this theme called Leia named after the princess from star wars. Here’s wat u get upon searching, (although u might find more of bikini clad women).

(Read more…)

It would appear so.The cancer sniffer

The British Medical Journal this week published the results of a study in which dogs - ordinary pets - were able to distinguish the urine of patients with bladder cancer from that of healthy people.
Doctors believe the animals detect the scent of the abnormal proteins present in the urine of the patients with cancer.
It’s thought that a dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times better than a human’s.
The idea that dogs may be able to smell cancer was first put forward in 1989 by two London dermatologists, who described the case of a woman asking for a mole to be cut out because her dog would constantly sniff at it, even through her pants, but ignore all her other moles.
One day, the dog, a female border collie-Doberman mix, tried to bite the mole off when the woman was wearing shorts.
The mole turned out to be malignant melanoma, caught early enough to save her life.
Here’s the recent news, as reported last week by the BBC.
(Read more…)

The seven people lemma nd my experiments with ORkut!!!>!>!>!?!?!?

Its a small world after all!

Listening to japanese music, always makes me quirky. And as it happened one day, I was listening to the sound track of some of my favorite anime and not understanding a single word of the songs, but nevertheless thoroughly enjoying it. And with the vigour of japanese rock, a thought , an idea if you will, slowly started to take form. (insert evil laugh with lightening here!). Yes , It was from a very simple statistical conjuncture, often misleading and errenoulsy called the ‘7 people Lemma’. The lemma states that,

‘On an average every person in this world knows every other person through atmost 7 people excluding himself’

This was what made me spend a whole sleepless night with this website called orkut. Now “orkut.com is a new social networking service named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.)”. Self explainatory isin’t it. But thats not the point of this post anyway. Orkut, has an invite system, pretty much like google’s gmail . And, to get an acount you need to know someone already there. So, now you may ask what does all this have to do with the first few lines of this post.

Well, for starters, orkut is the perfect place to test the 7 person lemma. and orkut makes it even more comfortable to check it out, as it gives the shortest path to the person(yo! dijkstra!). So, now adapting the lemma for our cyberworld needs, I had to give the original conjuncture a bit more room. So, instead of 7 people, I had to increase the number to a comfortable 11(also because, I am the perfect asocialite possible!). And started experimenting.

And to say, the results were nothing short of astounding!. As I moved across communities, ethinicities, and sometimes even nationalities, the maximum length of path was mostly around 6 or 7. And the longest path I ever encountered on one whole day of ambling around in the orkut world, was around 10. And also, its always suprising when some person who you would never ever know, and possibly never meet in real life, is just 3 hops away. On the other hand, its also interesting to think about the fact that, when someone you reached through one friend, is even more easily by some other friend. Well, doesn’t this line of reasoning have a lot of interesting ramifications. So, what do you expect, Its a small world after all!!.

Signing off,
Sahil.

PS : any one, who wants an orkut invitation just mail me.(sahiilseth@gmail.com)

my dada (grand dad)  sent his views about pranayam, and here is a part of the reply i sent back

hi daddam,

It is actually amazing to see the results… it is the hard work of the ppl. In the Himalayas who had devised these simple exercises a thousand years ago…. those were the days when there were no BP machines … and the cause of the illness were seldom known and a few symptoms like ‘stress or pain’ the only ways to diagnose the illness of problems inside inside the body.

I wonder pulse rate or BP might have still been able to judge but how the hell can you know sugar levels..?????…

Thus were established the techniques of yoga

1. Which maintain your general health

2. Prevent stress

3 Give work to essential muscles, because many of the sadhus were believed to meditate for long—- so to prevent muscle Sagging…

And now remarkably WE the modern ppl sitting in front of the PC whole day long don’t give exercise our essential muscles… (lungs heart etc…)

Therefore, when after a long time when we do these excercises, we get remarkable results….

(Read more…)

Drugs—– A curse for all. But enjoy these commandments

1 - THOU SHALL NOT DEAL
Like any other war, in the Drug War there are the grunts (you) and there are the field generals (the dealers). The grunts take far more causalities because there are so many more of them, but the field generals suffer much more when they get hit.

2 - THOU SHALL NOT DO DOPE WITH KIDDIES.
IF THOU ART A KIDDY, THOU SHALL NOT DO DOPE.
Much like the dealers, kids get special treatment in the Drug War. Anyone over eighteen passes the pipe to anyone under eighteen and the gloves are off. Anytime kids are mixed up in your bust, everything is more painful and harder on your karma.

3 - THOU SHALL NOT COVET MORE THAN A MISDEMEANOR BUZZ.
Misdemeanors are painful and humiliating. Felonies leave scars and speech impediments. Keep your drug weight down and observe the First, Second and Seventh Amendments. Break these and possible pain starts at a year in the joint all the way to life.

(Read more…)

There Is Just One Thing Which Is Constant In Life And That Is Change. Internet explorer has really lost its battle in terms of the number of people who use it. This is because whoever downloads and uses firefox once in life never ever reverts back to internet explorer. And I have always loved it. But I really recommend to use the skin ifox.

If you couldn’t get my words clearly read more (Read more…)

HP dv8000z Specs:

• Processor: AMD Turion 64 ML-37 (2.0GHz/1MB L2 Cache)
• Screen: 17″ WSXGA BrightView Widescreen (1680 x 1050)
• Graphics: ATI Express Radeon 200M 128MB
• RAM: 1.0GB DDR SDRAM (2 x 512MB)
• Hard Drive: 80GB (2 x 80GB @ 5400RPM)
• Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW/R & CD-RW Combo w/Double Layer Support
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Battery: 8-cell lithium ion
• Weight: 8.1lbs
• Wireless54g(TM) 802.11b/g WLAN w/125HSM/SpeedBooster(TM)
• Dimensions: 11.1″(L) x 15.62″(W) x 1.48″(min)/1.82″(max)
• Ports: 1 ExpressCard/54 Slot (also supports ExpressCard/34), 1 Type I/II 32-bit card bus (also support 16-bit), 1 IEEE-1394(Firewire), 4 Universal Serial Bus (USB 2.0), TV-Out (S-video), Integrated Consumer IR (remote control receiver), Headphone out w/ SPDIF Digital Audio, Microphone in, 1 RJ-11 (modem), 1 Expansion Port 2 Connector, 1 RJ -45 (LAN)

Reasons for Buying

The dv8000z is a new and powerful desktop replacement by Hewlett Packard which I often call a “dabba”(which literally means a box in hindi). It has a high resolution 17″ monitor (1680 x 1050), and the option of installing two separate 80 Gigabyte drives for a total of 160 Gigs. (Read more…)