Posts

After the Delhi gang-rape case, there has been a sudden upsurge in traditional as well as social media over rape in India. As usual in such cases, the initial reaction is to find someone to blame. And in this case, the onus of the blame has been put on Patriarchal Indian Society - without realizing that more rapes happen in the not-so-patriarchal USA Indian masculinity - “who feel threatened by women asserting their identity” without realizing that rapes happen even with infants, senior citizens, visually challenged, mentally challenged and homely women in conservative villages of Haryana to Kerala. Indian Police - as if police officials are omniscient and should be present before the crime happens Honey Singh - I am expecting a petition against Vatsyayana next This blog post is a collection of thoughts about the same.

The book provides a nice summary of economic events of the recent past (~50 years) and builds upon the case for the coming 10 years. The book is divided into 14 different chapters covering emerging as well as frontier nations, the latter being less liquid and smaller than emerging.

Just completed reading " The Tangled web: A guide to securing modern applications" by Michael Zalewski. The book is surprisingly small given the amount of information it covers about the interaction of web browsers, websites, and client-side web technologies. The book starts with a discussion of what a valid URL could look like (http://yahoo.com:80@google.com/microsoft.com - think which site is being connected to here) and then discusses several fundamental building blocks of the modern web (like cookies) as well as standard technologies (like Flash) in depth....

The book is 50% story of Jobs and 50% history of the Valley. From the beginning of Apple to it becoming the world’s most valuable company, the book covers everything in depth (and is a bit too long) Some of the key things in the book are Steve Job’s fruitarian diet, journey to India, love for absolute minimalism, extreme (positive as well as negative) treatment of employees, relation with Bill Gates (and Microsoft), battle with Google, battle with cancer and a strong belief that normal rules simply don’t apply to him....

An amazing book which describes Google’s journey right from its beginning in the Stanford dorm. The author interviewed several top echelons of Google and presented several interesting insider anecdotes and stories of Google. The book provides details of major projects like Gmail, Google Desktop, Google News and Google Toolbar, Google Books and the failure of Orkut. It also describes the process of acquisition of YouTube, Blogger, Docs, GrandCentral and Double Click. Following are the few salient points. The book has many more interesting anecdotes which I am forced to skip here.

The first episode of Aamir Khan’s show Satyamev jayate raised the issue of female foeticide in Rajasthan. While the show asked for stringent laws, it missed a few major reasons behind the same.

Let us say an average American drives 15, 000 miles per year; The exact average being 16550 miles.

The book presents a generalists view of post-independent India. Unlike India Unbound, this book focuses primarily on post-independent India and takes a more pragmatic approach towards understanding the problems of contemporary India. The best parts of the book are the interesting contradictions that the nation went through - love/hate relationship with the English language, fear of technology, and neglected urban development. Overall, the book is divided into four sets of ideas, that have arrived, that are in progress, that are still being debated, and finally, that have yet to become part of public debate. I have highlighted the best sections of the book in bold.

Internet, which initially started as a DARPA experiment is [still] under the indirect control of USA government through ICANN despite several objections from Europe as well as IBSA. This worked when most users were from the western world with the notable exception of China and few minor quirks. But in the past few decades, not only the governments around the world are putting more controls but also the internet users (as well as enterprises) are fighting back against US control. In this blog post, I will describe the main threats to the existence of (current form of) Internet.

This blog post is not about how good or bad the product technically is or how indigenous it is; it’s about a fundamental problem with tablets. It amazes me to see that even a journalist like T. Friedman missed it. Anyone who had ever used a tablet will tell you that even the best of the current-generation tablets are for consumption and not content generation.