I have been restraining myself from making any blog post on the Mumbai Terror drama since the past 24 hours - but its gone on for too long now for me to keep it low ... First things first - I think its essential that our ministers take moral responsibility of what has happened. The two Home Ministers in specific - Shivraj Patil (India) and RR Patil (Maharashtra) should show some sense of morality by resigning. Why - you would ask .. well the lesser said about their performance and attitudes in such situations - the better. Next - all our intelligence and security agencies (including Defense forces, Coast Guard, and IB/RAW) must take it up on them to identify where their systems failed when these kids with guns were running their mock-sessions to take Mumbai under siege. Then - we must take some stern action against the organizations who have been involved. Laskhar, we know now operates out of Muzaffarabad in PoK - what is stopping us from taking a US-like approach and bombing their hid...

Yeah! That’s what I have been doing in the past 3 days – having spent all nights on Train berths rather than any beds.  I left Mumbai on Aug-Kranti Rajdhani on Friday evening for Delhi, reached Delhi at 11 AM on Saturday. Milind had come up to pick me up from Nizamuddin railway station. On our way, I marveled at the well developed road infrastructure in New Delhi – the underpasses, overpasses, the big 8’s and big O’s creating a seamless flow of traffic at the junctions and crossovers. I stayed at to AshiMil’s place in Gurgaon for the day. This was my first visit to Gurgaon and I should say I was impressed - wide roads, huge open spaces, humongous buildings and malls and good road connectivity to New Delhi. If the development here is managed well, it may as well end up becoming the Shanghai of India (blowing Mumbai’s dreams!). Some essentials which they need to do: Expedite the metro connectivity to Delhi Decongest the internal road traffic (create multilevel flyovers, underpasses and o...

Here’s what I have been doing since August this year (and expected to do till Dec): 8-Aug Received Car delivery 9-Aug Went to Pune on first drive itself 15-Aug Getting used to driving to office everyday 22-Aug Work on new version of www.arbitmba.com 29-Aug Went to Lonavala with friends; came back and worked on remaining pieces of ArbitMBA new version 3-Sep 5-Sep Ganesh Chaturthi - went to Madh Island; after the gruelling weekend in Lonavla Release of www.arbitmba.com 12-Sep Went home for Ganesh Visarjan 19-Sep 26-Sep 3-Oct 10-Oct 17-Oct Mad race at work - with multiple assignment's on head, working Saturday's and Sunday's But also stole visits to - (Not Just) Jazz By the Bay, Bandra Reclamation, St. Mary's Church on weekends 24-Oct Went home for Diwali 31-Oct @ home post Diwali 7-Nov 14-Nov Rush to complete current project@work - working Saturday's, Visits to Inorbit over weekend 21-Nov Tentative plan to visit Khetan's marriage 28-Nov Might go to Pune if Mom...

I would not be too far from reality if I said that internet is my food and cellphones are my drinks. Yeah .. I am constantly using one of these two things - whether I am at work, at home, or on a vacation. So its particularly painful when my cellphone breaks down   And so it was even more troublesome when this time my phone's keypad went bad and after 15-20 days of enduring it, and trying to get it repaired/replaced, I was told that it was beyond repair. So finally, I decided to spend some more moolah on another phone ....  I bought a fully loaded HTC Touch ( P3000 ) - Windows Mobile, 64MB memory, 2.8" touch-screen, 2 Megapixel Camera. What I am going to use most if the internet and To Do list features. The battery seems ok - runs 2 days flat without any problems. Tried the Google Maps app for starters - and 'twas awwsome. So that takes my cellphone tally to 3 .. my previous 2 phones being Nokia 2865 LG RD2130  Post inspiration : Shubham  

For those who drive an LPG powered vehicle in Mumbai - here  is a list of all Auto LPG Station in Mumbai. Also check out my homepage  http://whoisnikhil.googlepages.com  :-)

Lot of analysis and discussions are going on across the internet and media about the current meltdown, the way out of it. Lots of conspiracy theories have popped up and quite a lot of economists have discussed opposing theories. Check out the two videos below for example: I personally believe there is too much simplification of the issue in most media discussions. What is happening is not a result of simple economic theories, nor the result of pure political manipulation at the international level.  There is too much of a mix of US domestic policies vs. US and Europe's international economic policies and India-China's sudden rise and emergence as global "cheap" goods and services destinations (and resulting loss of low value jobs in the developed economies).  Add the large scale immigration of Africans to Europe, Mexicans to US (Indian immigration to US is mostly skilled jobs and far too less in no to become a factor though), and thus the loss of low value jobs for na...

The news of an Indian origin financial advisor committing suicide after killing his entire family hit the headlines within hours of the event. I wonder if it had been an Indian farmer instead of a financial advisor, whether the news would have taken the same position on the newspapers. However, the stark similarity in context of the suicide with that of the Indian farmers prodded me to think which one of them was worse - the Financial Advisor's or the Farmer's. The farmer in India lives on the bottom edge of the economic ladder, is uneducated and enjoys little socio-economic security. However, the financial advisor was an affluent citizen (having made a fortune of $1.2mn once), had a social security number and was well educated. His committing suicide indicates a complete failure of the much touted "social security" which the west claims to be its achievement. However, look at it from another perspective. The financial advisor works on estimates and projections of se...

I've recently bought a car (more on that in my next post) ... and have been driving around Mumbai - especially along the narrow traffic in front of IIT main gate.  Driving a new car on Mumbai roads is quite traumatic - because you are often driving barely inches away from the rickshaw or goods carrier which might be swaying from left to right (thanks to the potholes and uneven terrain of Mumbai's roads)  - and every moment you run a risk of kissing the bruised exterior of the next vehicle - and as a result getting a nice scratch on yours. Image Credit :  Guy Kawasaki Often when I drive, I also look around for other small cars and their sides. Almost 90% of them have scratches itched on them at some place; about 50% also have a dent or two somewhere. I suppose drivers in Mumbai have to resign themselves to the fact that their car will get scratches and dents sometime or the other - sooner than later. Trying to save yourself of this can only be stressful while you drive. I dare s...

All web applications are pull-based in nature, in effect meaning that the client (your browser) can request more data from a server, the server cannot send data voluntarily to the client.  Thus while a client can ask the server for the body of a known email, the server is unable to inform the client of any newly arrived emails unless the client specifically asks.  Hence, for data that may change without interaction from the current user (eg prices, bids, chat, email) the client must poll the server to discover any changes to the data set. Currently, this is how most of the web applications work. Comet Comet is a Ajax based technology which overcomes the push-limitation of the web by using the ability of a server to hold poll requests until either a timeout or an event occurs, so that the server can send a response at any time to communicate an event to the client. A very nice layman intro to Ajax-Push or Comet technology can be found here . For more info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(p...