Tuesday, December 12, 2006

The Power within

This is not about any spiritual stuff as most of u will misunderstand from the title. I was referring to the power within each atom, each nucleus- the nuclear power. I am not going to bore the readers(if there are any) telling u guys about the technology and science behind nuclear power. Instead lets go directly to the talk of the day : Henry J Hyde India US Peaceful Atomic Energy Co operation act of 2006 (PAEC).
The idea of such a co operation was born during the 2005 visit of Bush to India and to remind you all the corporation between India and US on the nuclear front ended with our 1971 Budha smile's test. After that for 35 odd years India was in a nuclear winter, completely isolated from all other nuclear powers.(We cant say complete isolation because our old allie Russia was always with us both in terms of fuel and technology). India with Russia's backing have build up 22 nuclear reactors till the date which are generating electricity and meeting 3% of our power needs. But as we all are aware , we have been growing quite fast for last few years and with our stock markets, our energy needs also have been growing. So it became indespensible for our PM to ask Bush the ticket to return to the nuclear club. I completely accept his logic in that. We all know that we dont have enough thermal resources (potrol or quality coal) to generate power, neither are our depleating hydal resources sufficient to meet the new requirement. So only remaining feasible resource for quatified production is the atom.

Now lets look into the deal that the US have put forward. The plus in this deal is that it opens the doors of IAEA and the nuclear supplier's group and India will be able to buy Uranium for its reactors. In return India will became a full ally of US and help her in preventing proliferation of "nuclear poison" around the world.(and learn to forget that 99% of all the nuclear weapons are with big guys of IAEA). India will also get nuclear fission technology (supposed to be latest.......who knows ??) .
And the negatives: First is that US is not going to give India any enrichment or re processing technologies so we will have to figure out a way ourselves to complete our nuclear cycle. Second is that our credibility of being a good ally will be assessed every year by the US president and he will have the power to suggest to the NSG to discontinue our status as a peaceful nuclear nation. Thirdly we need to get the go ahead of IAEA and NSG before 123 agreement starting real co operation materialises making it trouble some for us to go back to NSG again for any last minute victory in negotiations we make. Another big problem is that we will have to open up our civilian nuclear facilities for US inspectors if the IAEA finds it powerless to send its own inspectors(Guess this will happen often) and finally we wont be able to exportl any of military technologies(expect some low range primitive weapons) or test any more nuclear devices. (This clause is going to adversly effect our plans to export Brahmos)

Although I may appear to be against this deal, its not the real case. I was just being diplomatic and explaining the cons. I believe we should go ahead with this deal because most of these clauses which appear trecherous for us now can be forgotten easily with the changing circumstances of the business. The biggest reason why I am telling this is because this deal is going to open up the very attractive nuclear sector to US businessmen and once they have investments here, they will take care of the senate and congress and even the Presidents. Another reason is that we are in a fit and there is no other way out to retain our competative edge as a investment destination.
The nuclear power market of the world as we know is in crisis. With the majority public opinion aginst it, most of the biggies have withdrawn from this business. An ideal example is the GE which said good bye in early 90's. They cant be blamed, US, Canada , Europe and ofcourse Japan with their memories from the world war 2 hates any more nuclear reactors in their country. So it is the developing guys like India and China were the market exist if at all. No wonder US is succumbing to Indian pressures or are they really ............

Friday, August 04, 2006

IT Gardens

Hi to all those guys who frequented my blog( I know there arent many). Anyway it s good to be back............leaving behind all the crap that I was through for last 6 months.
In this post I will write about my new home the garden city. Yah guys I am at present in Bangalore the IT capital of India. I still remember my 1st visit here in 1994. I was in 4th then and Infosys & Wipro were just glitters in the eyes of Narayan Murthy & Premji. So was Bangalore, then a favorite domestic holiday location(there were no foriegn tourists then in India). Bangalore was famous for its gorgeous climate then, a gift bestowed uniquely to it by the altitude and surprisingly the by the absence of the great nuetralising agent: the sea. But exactly this was its boon too. Absence of sea made bangalore humidity free & pleasent through out the year. So everybody visiting the rich heritage architecture of Mysore visited B'lore for its pleasentness & cheap goods. Once the favoured locations in Bangalore were the Lal Bagh and Tipu's palace but now they are Forum and Garuda malls. The paradigm shift is not shocking the culture of banglore have chaged a lot in last 10 years. No wonder it is no longer the Air conditioned city..........it now the IT city, the beautiful gardens are long gone and have been replaced by dirty streets and concrete grooves.........now people working in busy bangalore go to hill stations nearby in the weekends.What an Irony ???????

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

The Knowledge Bomb

While doing our final year project, the best reference help we got all through out was internet. The huge amount of knowledge available at ur fingertips was really a marvel. I believe, it is the new blogging culture which has contributed heavily to this terabytes of material about anyhting and everything available on net. But even when making good use of this knowledge, we all conviniently forget that this information is unedited and ametuerish. Mistakes mostly spellings and misjudged uses rule the internet now.
Let me give you an example:
"If you believe the internet is the font of all wisdom, giving free reign to exercise their vocal chords". This sentence now correctly written will look something like this.
"If you believe the internet is the fount of all wisdom, giving free rein to exercise their vocal cords"
Very frequently mis-spelled or misunderstood are words like fount(meaning a source of desirable quality) which occur generally in phrases. Other eg:s are free-rein(meaning letting horse loose) which is substituted with free-reign(pointing to free rule), vocal chords(chords means tones and cords means strings).
Other widely misinterpreted words include sleight(slight) of hand, buck(butt) naked, shoo(shoe) in etc.
A pattern can be clearly seen emerging from these phrases. These mistaken phrases are all old and ones which originated from other languages like Greek. The new generation bloggers and other frequent net users with heard knowledge about these phrases use them with assumed meanings. True! new words are born this way, but the process takes nearly 100 years.
Are we on the onset of a new era where a small percentage of people decide the way a new word is born or restructured? Lets wait & see!

Monday, January 30, 2006

The misunderstood leader 2

After the death of Rajiv Gandhi, when congress returned to power, finding him a successor and the new Indian prime minister was the problem that tormented the whole nation. After a lot of brainstorming, the CWC and the high command came up with a person who was virtually not heard of till then. He was none other than Mr.P V Narasimha Rao ,the person who was going to change India's perspective.
The new PM had a flurry of problems waiting for him, both internal and external. On one side, when the provinces of Kashmir and Punjab were being wrecked havoc by jihadis and sikh rebels, Indian economy altogether was facing major crisis with a high inflation, alarming imports to export ratio, and depleated foriegn exchange. But wilfully for us, the new guy was not one who gave up very soon. As any good manager, he started his work by inducting a new team, first memeber of which was the father of Indian economic reforms : Dr. Manmohan Singh (the then RBI governor was called upon to be the new finance minister). What happened next is history, India under Manmohan and PVN opened doors for FDIs & FIIs trying ard next five years to bring India back to her feet. PM under such circumstances had to be strict & tough, but this resulted in wide spread disgust against him in every possible arena. The supporting parties withdraw support and he had to finally buy an MP to protect his majority.
Narasimha Rao holds a lot of records. He was the person to get elected with the highest ever majority(around 7.5 lac votes), he was the PM who ruled with the lowest ever majority(1 MP in Lok Sabha). He was the PM who laid the base for our new age economic reforms, is believed to be the person who laid the base for Pokran nuclear test, was the only PM to have registered cases against him during his tenure( 3 cases...in all of which he was acquainted later on).Altogether we can call him a real loser, never got the credit for the great work he did. Even his own party deserted him after his tenure, the head office of which he left forever soon after his five year rule, only to be returned for a short respectful display as a cadaver.

Friday, January 20, 2006

The misunderstood leader

During one of those heated GD sessions we persued during our CAT coaching, at some point the topic drifted to Rajeev Gandhi. Surprisingly after the session our moderator started talking very emtionally about him. He highlighted the inability on his part to make decisions and held him responsible for 'Ayodhya'. Was it all true. Although Rajeev Gandhi is heavily criticized for his mismangement, I think we are forgetting his achievements. This reluctant politician who was responsible for the breaking up of many sections from congress was also the one resposible for the modernisation of our communication and transportation infrastructure. His techno-savy nature paved way for the entry of mobile phones to India which is an indespensible entity now. The youngest PM of India, the PM who ruled with maximum majority in Lok Sabha, also the PM who took largest world bank loans. We cant really blame him for that, our economy was in such a state. We were adamant about not allowing any FDIs or FIIs and our crude oil and defense import bills(thanks to our neighbour Pakistan) were always well above our meagre exports. So to persue modernisation, he had to go for loans. But its a golden achievement for him that India recorded a record economic growth of 10.5% in the last year of his rule. Needless to say he was efficient and far-sighted, but still couldnt manage India well. Simple answer, you cant expect a piolet to learn the intricacies & fallacies of Indian politics in a day and head a bunch of corrupt, crooked and cunning politicians with the help of an army of lazy, uninterested beaurocrats. Fianlly one of them or many of them under the one big one pulled him down & made a new party whose fragments are creating all sorts of problems in Indian politics now with their caste & religous vote banks.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Meet Rahul Devassy

It was my first introduction talk in NITC and we all were consoled by the HOD and professors that our choice of electrical was all that not bad. In the individual introduction to be made there we were asked to tell about our hobbies.After a long queues of monotonous reading and listening to music finally a sleepy looking guy emerged from the last benches who instantaneously reminded me of Bugs bunny.The similarity was stunning ,even their styles matched.He started "Hi ! I am Rahul Devassy.................................and my hobby is sleeping and sleeping only".
I dont know whether he really meant what he said, but he seems to be doing that after his hobbies of advanced physics and Linux programing.My first impression about this guy was that he was a stupid fellow who was at the wrong place.Although I was terribly wrong about my first impression, I still think he is at the wrong place (he should have been in one of the IITs or TIFR).
To put up his character sketch, he is a genius who thinks he can impress anybody with his simpleton behavior and "all world is a joke" attitude.This is Devassy on any ordinary day,but comes the exams and Devassy is a all new person who is well versed with any subject and finds new places to hide from story seekers.
Although popularly rumored about being unnatural ,we all know that he is only over friendly and expresses his friendship explicitly.But there is one more Devassy,highly unpredictable and hot tempered ,we are lucky we dont see this Devassy often.
So that friends is RAHUL DEVASSY, very likeable, very smart and very mysterious.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

The Tale of two cities

Once upon a time there were two cities.One known for its intellectual richness and resourcefulness while the other for its passion for religion.Ironically they both took birth on a single day and had a lot in common.Through the ages they both maintained very strong armies much above their capability taxing their people passionately fighting eachother.
You would have understood by now that I m talking about New Delhi and Islamabad. Both of whom is rated among top ten of world armies.Their fights which dates back to 1947 were all for the paradise on earth called Kashmir.Pakistan still regards Kashmir as their territory but the when given the choice Kashmir wanted to join India after formation of India & Pakistan.(Not to forget even Pakistan people voted for Frontier Gandhi.I m talking about the elections when Khan Abdul Gafar Khan's party swept the polls in Pakistan and reduced Jinnah's Muslim league to a miniscule)But lets forget the past as we all know its no longer the people's voice is heard out even in a democracy.............Its loudest voice.Even if shout the lie its believed but do shout it.I don't believe the Kasmiri view is in anyway represented by hurriyat either in Kashmir or in POK because I sincerely believe nobody would like to have bombs blow and guns fire in their backyard.They all want peace and would love to live in harmony with their relatives in POK.Indian govt has taken a huge step in this issue by being very patient.Inspite of frequent terrorist attacks whose leads were tracked to ISI( Delhi bomb blasts) we have shown unbelievable patience in going on with cease fire.We tried our best to help in their dark times of quake but was kicked on face.Although Paks responded well initially to our peace reforms they are still trying to break the pace.I can understand an elected representative trying to make thing sluggish(as he has got an election over the corner every now and then) but a dictator..................That's something difficult to deduce.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Should Scandinavian cockroaches be given the right to speak

There had been virtually a pandemonium in early 90's about equal rights for males and females and subsequently for one third reservation in parliament for women. Now with return of congress, famous for their reservations of all kind the furor has returned.Do really reservations may it be for women or scheduled caste really something worthy and do they achieve their objectives is something we should think upon atleast when this reservation story has completed 50years of 'glory'.
I will compare this reservation story to my title about the non-existent cockroaches who were to be given the right to speak. The reservations originally brought about by Mahatma Gandhi to ennoble the 'harijans' and bring them in to the mainstream of population and subsequently to bring about equality in the society giving opportunity to even the most deprived ones.
The real story today, a bunch of educated and aware people use the opportunity of reservations for generations each time fooling the government by underquoting their salaries. They become richer and richer and add to the workforce more and more talentless people.Today every government office you can find people who still dont know what they are doing and what they should be doing ? I wont say that Indian government is not aware of this. They had started many think tanks to discuss and identify troubles in the reservations............but committees got confined only to the committee rooms.
Cure : I believe the government should understand that its high time to change its look towards reservations.Reservations must be allowed in the social setup but must be based only on income. The less income groups should get reservations not anybody else.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Belling the CAT

I dont think this is a good way to start posting on your blog. But this is the best time to talk about the mother of all exams. The arena is set and the warriers ready to go for the grand finale on 20th November. Although I have almost lost hopes for a call this year, I plan to board that ship sometime. May be as a lateral entry after 1or 2 years in L&T. There are a lot of attraactive aspects of a PGDM in IIM, the 1st of which is a very heavy pay package. Its not over ur also going to get to study with the best brains in India along with a very promising and satisfying career.
So for all those guys who are waging for it , best of luck.
For guys like me, best of luck in advance