Great Depression 2.0?

Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz may believe that India's well placed to take on Round 2 of recession, but right from the day of 'subprime mortgage crisis', I have always felt that this IS depression. I did not live during Great Depression in 1930s, but quite sure that world was not a small place then as it is now. I earn my butter (unfortunately?) only because of globalization, but the spread of 'growth' in the name of industrialization has only created 'exclusivity' of different kinds.

The inevitable collapse of the dollar did say that to perk up economy in the US, rest of the world has to start consuming. These nations have been living far below than what they could actually live with. The bank runs that have been happening in US are not happening in India exactly because of this. It is not to say that India has been conservative but banks in India knew what they were doing and DID ONLY THAT. Though there was a short period of time when 'private banks' like ICICI and HDFC almost gave loans for free (my home loan is entirely free) in the sense that they believed that I will repay (that I have been repaying regularly is another issue). Loan was granted when I was working in Texas Instruments, but I dont think they know where/if I worked 5 months after getting the loan or even where/if I work currently. IT domain was given 'collateralized debt obligation' then, I guess :)) In India, maybe we dont like to default on loans and would like pay it diligently/sincerely to have some respect in the society. Society/family is far more important, STILL :((

In India, probably the older 'castes' are becoming insignificant as a new 'digital divide' is playing far more crucial role. There is no point in being happy that India is better off than other nations in this 'recession'. That is another point because recession is 'perceived' milder compared to depression. Just like that Richard Dawkins talk on using 'agnostic' instead of 'atheist' is perceived 'well' in some sections of the society. How well people behaved during the Great Depression might also be a point of concern. I think people have become more single minded for sure atleast in countries like India. The distribution of 'discomfort/pain' is good globally but brutal locally. Of course, hope-peddlers will always give the tinkerbell principle

you can fly, but only if you believe you can fly

I am a cynic, you see :(

The beginning of the end in WB?

If people had any doubts about Mamata Didi, the fighter, then news 'Trinamool Congress outperforms Left in West Bengal civic polls' should settle it. To put in Richie Benaud's terms, she is not a now-and-then-scrapper, she is a real FIGHTER. I hope that she doesnt become complacent because municipal polls are municipal polls and assembly polls are assembly polls. Just because she has won municipal polls, she should not hurry assembly polls. Contrary to some 'analysts' like Cho Ramasamy, who are 'conservative', I would like her to go into Assembly polls alone and 'ignore' the Congress, though support from Centre could be helpful if Trinamool wins as expected and Mamata indeed becomes the Chief Minister. Allying with Congress 'to be safe' will lead to needless nuisance. She should take her time, plan things well and go for the kill ALONE at the scheduled time. In India, only Tamil Nadu and Kashmir can say that they have 'almost banished' Congress. In all other states, Congress is one of the two main parties, if not the ruling party.

Though Uttar Pradesh or Bihar too did not have Congress rule for quite some time, still I suspect Congress always had its 'base' and now it is making a return, apparently due to the drive of Rahul Gandhi. West Bengal has Communist rule for decades and not that I have any axe to grind against them, but I find them to be 'textbookish' communists, talking perenially in jargons and looking towards China/Russia for everything. I think governments in Tamil Nadu (ADMK/DMK) have shown the way for pragmatic Communism and more importantly, 'inclusive growth' in the true sense of the word. Jammu and Kashmir may be another state which also has banished Congress. It is time that West Bengal too displaces Congress formally and more forcefully as the main party in a state. West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are one of the top important states, atleast by numbers. DMK has virtually been ruling for the last three terms, winning parliamentary elections comprehensively, being part of BJP led NDA for one terms and with Congress led UPA for two terms now.

I think Mamata has many factors on her side. The main factor is she is fighting communists. In these days of single mindedness, I wonder how Bengalis voted for Communists for so long. Trinamool infact has the biggest challenge. Even if it wins in 2011, it should know that it cant change things overnight. The entire 'government machinery' has been oiled and used to communist 'methods'. She in all likelihood, can only but 'disappoint' Bengalis, much like Obama in US. Audacity of hope is fine but voters are finicky to expect 'instant' changes, which are definitely not possible in democracy. US or West Bengal.

Freelancer - DFT mercenary?

After 4 years in Texas Instruments, since I started working as an 'employee', to put in Ian Chappell's words on captaincy

I was done by the end of it, probably a little before the four years.

In India, there is some 'halo' on being 'technical'. My paper was accepted in a professional conference (VDAT, 2000) even before I started working! My paper was again accepted the next year as well (VDAT, 2001). Again to quote Ian Chappell, I didnt want to be an Adelaide Oval captain. I had to see/check where I stand in 'global' arena. I was one of the co-authors in the paper presented in International Test Conference (2002) and this paper was considered one among the top 12 papers of the conference. Obviously the next step is to see if I am 'good enough' doing it all alone. Texas Instruments did file disclosure at US PTO (2003) with me as 'sole inventor'. I sort of 'rewrote' one entire tool in 5 days on my own (WITHOUT 'normal work' getting affected) since I felt that the legacy 'tool' in the company was unwieldy and not at all optimized. Without losing any of the features and using the contemporary VPI methodology (instead of PLI) for Verilog RTL which 'mimicked' the ATE, I had a demonstrable methodology which was faster and had a small memory footprint. We were still using 32 bit machines then and memory footprint was a big concern. It was least surprising (atleast to me) that the paper authored by me alone was accepted in International Test Conference (2004). I am/was not very eager to go abroad (forget 'settling abroad'), but when my manager said that 'I cannot go for the conference since the company is going through tough times', I felt that enough was enough. The paper does indeed mention the company's name, had got the clearance from senior managers in US and India and I was probably the first in the company, if not the country to have a 'sole authored' paper. To add insult to the injury, I was told that a 'senior person' from India is going to the same conference and he can present MY paper :(

Quite a few months before, I informed my manager that I am quitting. I could have told just 30 days before, but my own framework of fairplay asked me to say it much earlier. I didnt feel like working and there was no point in going through the motions. I also felt that there is nothing new or great that is going to shake my domain (DFT). Humans world over are stuck with legacy and they cant avoid 'backward compatibility' at all. Another probably big reason was that marriages of all my sisters were over and there is no particular 'monetary' reason that I need to continue to work. I had started the website in March 2004 itself with the only intention of being a freelancer. I dont know whether etymology of 'entrepreneur' has some relation with 'enterprise' or vice-versa. I was amused to read Downturn's silver line: More people turn entrepreneurs

The idea of being a freelancer is exciting professionals and they believe that they are skillful enough to move away from traditionalemployment relationship and pick self- employment, the survey report shows, in India, there are people who prefer being freelancers and are promoting others too.

Well, as usual, I was an early bird ;)

Since then, I had worked as employee in many companies - as diverse as SAP Labs to my 'last company', AMD. I didnt expect to leave AMD as I did, but I had planned to leave AMD two months after I actually did. There was a visitor from US in the 12/24 core processor project (Hydra/Istanbul) in which only I was working on the DFT aspects and I wanted to quit after he left. Since then, I had been on 'freelance' mode, not unusual for me. Even with the current company where I work as a 'freelance consultant', I am not happy with the manager (when was I ever happy with an INDIAN manager?). Whether it was SAP Labs or Nvidia Graphics or NXP semiconductors or AMD or the current management, my managers (all of them patently 'Indian') were hopeless (some dont even know what 'professional behavior' means and some have done PhDs in US universities!) and I dont want to rate the best among the worst. Indians love playing 'one-up-manship'/authority game and are all 'casteist' to the core. After all, 'management' hierarchy is profound casteism and as Kancha Ilaiah would say, casteism is profound racism.

Cook-Levin and I

My hit at NP-completeness kept me thinking on those lines. Today, I was reading Cook-Levin Theorem in the bus on my way to work. It actually simplifies. Rather, it atleast simplifies my understanding of the problem instead of those esoterics of polynomial time non-deterministic algorithm (clumsy English :().

An expression is satisfiable iff there is some assignment of truth values to the variables that makes the entire expression true.

I am getting more and more convinced that this is a 'doable' problem. Boolean satisfiability problem is the problem of determining if the variables in a given boolean formula can be assigned in such a way as to make the formula evalue to TRUE. I think there are two ways of approaching this problem - one to 'satisfy' it and simultaneously try to 'negate' it. Negation is a common method in theorem proving. You make an assumption and proceeding further on it arrive at a contradiction, thus negating the assumption. Boolean formulae are in two mutually convertible forms - sop (sum of products) and pos (product of sum). For example,

A'B'C+A'BC+ABC'+ABC=(A'+B'+C')(A'+B+C')(A'+B+C)(A+B'+C)

I think now we should try to prove AND negate to arrive at the solution. Prove using sop and negate using equivalent pos. Taking sop, it is obvious that in boolean addition, even one term (say A'B'C) evaluating to TRUE would lead to whole boolean equation evaluating to TRUE. Similarly taking pos, it is obvious that in boolean multiplication, even one term (say A'+B'+C') evaluating to FALSE would lead to the whole boolean equation evaluating to FALSE. So A=0, B=0, C=1 would lead A'B'C=1, thereby whole equation to 1. Similarly A=1,B=1,C=1 would lead A'+B'+C'=0+0+0=0. Use sop to prove and pos to negate. What is the 'issue' here (in getting the million $)? ;)

Wonder what/where the catch is :o

When women were service-driven

Maybe, the 'were' in the 'Memories of Madras' section should have been 'bold' (pun intended). The another part that I empathized in the column was

The malls are quite vulgar. The amount of food thrown into the dustbins in kalyana mandapams is heart rending. Weddings are all show. Everyone stands in a queue like a conveyor belt today, and there is little warmth.

I remember being very amused to see people standing in a queue, when I attended a marriage in Bangalore (early 2000) after I joined Texas Instruments for my project work. I remember mentioning the same to my roommate and he said that it is the case 'everywhere' :o I had not seen such a thing in my state, ie Tamil Nadu then. As always, being part of India, the rot comes into Tamil Nadu too, albeit a bit late but latest ;)

Today, they want marriages on weekends and I guess they attend it 'religiously' so that they can avoid cooking :( Coming to 'cooking', the quality of cooking has gone to the abyss. I have not tasted a well-cooked 'home food' for decades. Of course, my mother was always exceptional, maybe as they say that you cant beat Tirunelveli women in cooking. For the modern womenfolk, medium becomes the means. They spend a lot of time on 'frills' and 'garnishing' to make it 'look good', not taste good. My maternal grandmother was good, unsurprisingly, though I think she was not 'exposed' to different genres of food, having lived most of her life in Sri Lanka. She was very very ordinary when it came to roti or food out of wheat in general. Unfortunately, culinary skills of my sisters remain very ordinary. They can take comfort that they are like the rest of the world :o In marriages, they talked much about giving dosai when the trend started, instead of the usual pongal and idli. Now it is probably a surprise if dosai is not given in a marriage.

Lot of choice but no variety :(

Volcano in Iceland

I associate volcanoes more with equatorial region than above tropic of cancer or below tropic of capricorn, of course without any reason. When I first saw/read about volcano in Iceland, I was amused. There is a country called Iceland and it has a volcano which has become active. I remember seeing one James Bond film about Iceland and since it is a film, I thought it is just 'fiction' and thought of it to be a near 'virgin island' or to put in Tamil 'கன்னித்தீவு' just like the one Tom Hanks lands in 'Cast Away'.

Today I first read the grim prognosis. Then I read about the Icelandic plume and the plunge. To quote, Grounding of 17,000 flights for the last three days makes it the biggest airspace shutdown since the Second World War. First I saw how far Iceland is from Europe, rather mainland Europe by checking the map. It seems to be atleast 1000 kms from London or Frankfurt :o I remember one volcano erupting in Andamans which is nearly the same distance from Chennai. I dont remember any flight disruptions in Chennai, though Chennai was not a 'busy airport' in those days.

Maybe the volcano in Andamans is just active for the sake of being 'active'. I remember Mount Vesuvius (somewhere in Europe) being the active in the past century. It is time that nature gets back at humans ;)

Online accounts: The name of the rose?

I was never 'tech savvy', rather I never liked to be one. Of course, I knew what the 'in-thing's were but never liked to be part of it. In my college days, creating email accounts were 'big'. For one, we had to pay for 'browsing' and also I am not a 'surfer'. Unless I had some specific purpose, I dont wander around amidst lot of pages. It is natural that I dont know lot of websites. Banking or booking tickets in the net is a necessary evil and I dont avoid that. Already there are too many 'names' and 'passwords' for such account, that I find it ridiculous. There are billions of people in this world and 'raghuraman' is not always available. It was ok till last year when I was able to manage many accounts with a simple (some would say silly) password and good memory. Creating these 'tough' passwords is a NP-complete problem for me :o It is amusing therefore when others created accounts for me!

I have a lot of 'hangover'. So the accounts that I create on my own are most often college or employee ids. I use 'a0756945', 'maa9716', '1015' (if I dont get raghuraman or raghuraman.r)! My passwords are even more ridiculous. It used to be rcube or rrr and it was good then. Now all websites, especially banking ones, want us to have one password with one capital letter, one special character and all that nonsense :( When I was in Texas Instruments, there used to be one system which will generate passwords and we had to just choose. I used to love that because it relieves me of a 'big problem' ;)

I think the first problem happened when a person created an email id 'raghuramthegreat' in yahoo out of 'whatever' :( It is not in my nature to 'naturally' hurt and so I used that id for sometime. I read her 'so well' that she also used to login to see if I am using :( I dont know how but this id 'spread' to few others as well and I was not amused when one MBA guy in my college mentioned the same in front of my class. I couldnt shrug it off like Atlas, atleast till some years ago. I thought I am 'relieved' but the bogie is continuing. I never liked facebook (because it is popular in US?) and one guy has created an id all the same using my picture in Orkut. I dont know why people dont mind their own business :( He has put my date of birth as 14 April 1970 and one of the photos from orkut as well! I dont know if I look 'so old' but the unkindest cut was my name was given as 'Raghuraman Ramaprasadh'! Who is Ramaprasadh? I could have well ignored this 'id' but changing my father's name forces me to intervene.

To hell with all these accounts.