I've been thinking about this for more than a little while now and it crystallized over the New Year's first week or so. I was talking to iamneo and a few other friends about what we intended to do this year, and where we felt we were, in the course of our lives, the directions that we could chose and so on. It struck me suddenly that some of us, those ( Read more... )

Siddu insisted that I post about him, so here goes. Siddu got into INSEAD, for the next academic year. Personally, the only reason I'm happy about INSEAD is that he'll come to Paris sometime and I'll get to meet him. It's been 10 years since we met last, in Bangalore. Mom is a bit confused as to why my generation simply refuses to grow up and ( Read more... )

My paper submitted to the 25th ACM SAC got accepted, last week. This is only my second paper and I really ought to be more excited about getting my ideas out there and critiqued by the community. But I'm largely underwhelmed and the only excitement is the prospect of a trip to Switzerland, in March. Even when I submitted it, I wasn't too impressed ( Read more... )

Does anyone have any info on Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad? How good is it? I know that it's a bonafide institution set up by the Govt. of India, but is it really a good place? What about the Technical University of UP ( Read more... )

One of the problems with our political affairs is the absence of moderation, the middle ground that Indians are supposed to be famous for. The current brouhaha over Jinnah being a case in point. Unfortunately, anything or anyone associated with our independence movement is either lionised or vilified. A mature democracy should be able to sift the ( Read more... )

Here's the pics from the Paris trip ( Read more... )

Here's a recount of my week long trip to Paris. If memory serves right, I shall recount each day's events in chronological order. It's going to be a tad long, so those of you with a life and better things to do, should skip read ( Read more... )

Last week was a bit of a disappointment. I went to Oxford to attend a talk by Val Harian (chief economist of Google, Haas Professor of Economics at Berkeley) on 'Computer mediated transactions'. Since my research has a tangential interest in economics, I was eager to listen and learn. The talk turned out to be a most uninspired one. It never got ( Read more... )

Today, while invigilating, I saw a student type the following code into Matlab ( Read more... )

Nothing quite brings out a person's mental model of the world and how things ought to be, like eating food from other cultures ( Read more... )