The Shoppers Stop mystery

Is it Shoppers Stop or Shopper's Stop or Shoppers' Stop. Looks like even they can't decide. If I owned the retails chain, I would have fired my entire marketing/branding team for this fiasco. Let me show you what I mean.

This is their original logo. It clearly reads Shoppers' Stop.

Now for the new logo. The apostrophe disappears. The company is now called Shoppers Stop.





But it doesn't stop there. Their website is titled Welcome to Shopper's Stop. Ditto in the 'Ab








I am generally not a grammar stickler, but this is quite surprising as SS is a very reputed retail chains of India. Let's hope that they rectify the situation as soon as they can. Till then dumb Shoppers like me will wonder whether the company wants us to Stop and not come to their store.

For people interested in similar grammatical goof-ups, do read Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss.

To DK Sir, with love

Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee,
and there I find him worthier to be loved.

(from In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred Tennyson)

D. K. sir was my guru of Loyola. I was mortally scared of integrals in my 12th standard. Try as I might, I could never score well in Maths 2. I barely managed to pass in my 12th standard Maths prelim exams. But a few weeks under DK sir's guidance changed all that. He would teach me one chapter a day, explain all the basic theories again and again till I got the hang of them. Slowly and steadily my performance in Maths started improving and managed to get a good score in my 12th boards.

But DK sir was not just a teacher. He was a friend and a guide. He would always give students advice during classes. If anyone came late, he would say "you are going to become future doctor and engineer. you cannot come late when patient is dying". He made sure that we enjoyed his classes. He would never refuse to give us a free period and would take us to the ground to play games. He was the only teacher who used to attend all socials and rakshabandhans and enthusiastically take part in all games. He would always ask about all ex-students whenever I met him.

There is so much I wanted to say to him, starting with "thank you". Hope you can read this sir, wherever you are. I am very thankful for everything you did to help Aloka, me, and so many others survive through those harrowing months of 12th standard.

Mr. D. K. Shah was a maths teacher at St. Xavier's High School, Loyola Hall, Ahmedabad. He died on 18th April, 2008 in a horrific accident in Mumbai. Sir was going to retire in 2008-2009.

How to fix Nirma?

Today I am going to try and analyze what's wrong with the Institute of Technology at Nirma University. I have been complaining about my college for the past 3.75 years without suggesting any steps on how things can be made better. Here are my suggestions on how to fix the college:

1. Stop spending so much money on growing grass in the college and put some to poach good teachers to the institute. The CE/IT dept. has a large number of teachers with no experience. A good prof. is worth tons of infrastructure. I am ready to sit under a tree to study if the prof. is worth it.

2. Once you start getting good profs., make fluent English a compulsory requirement for teachers. Almost half of the staff cannot convey anything when speaking in English. A 15 year old kid would pronounce and spell better than they would. Our textbooks, online references, assignments, answer papers are all in English. How can you let these people, who can hardly understand the language, teach subjects?

But no one in the right mind would come to a college like this leaving DA-IICT, SVNIT, MSU or even an IIT. So things need to be changed with the environment.

3. Do away with compulsory attendance. I know this would meet with a lot of resistance and is very difficult to digest, but would make a hell lot of a difference with the environment. Close to 7 minutes of a lecture is wasted taking attendance. 7(minutes)*4(lectures)*5(days)*16(weeks)=37 hours every semester wasted for attendance.

4. If the above can't be done, make attendance mandatory only for labs. Bring down the attendance requirement for lectures down from 80% to 75%.

5. Do away with the silly attendance reviews 3 times a semester. It serves no purpose and is a waste of everyone's time.

6. Take practical exams in the last lab. of each course. Currently a practical exam is worth only 5 marks (out of 100) but wastes 1 week of semester. Give that week off as a reading vacation, or shift theory exams to that week.

7. Give a day off after every theory exam. With the time saved by shifting the vivas, this can be achieved easily. This would give much more time to understand each subject thoroughly before the exams. If the IITs can do this, so can Nirma.

8. Do away with the assignments. This is another pointless exercise and a lot of forests have been sacrificed to serve this nonsensical task. If you can't do this, then reduce the number of assignments to 4 (one per month). Instead of picking questions directly from the text, make the faculty browse the net and find really challenging tasks. Make a set of 10 questions and give 1 question to a group of 5 students for every assignment.

9. Make the use of projectors in theory classes (this for CE/IT). There is no point in having theory classes in subjects like IWD, C, C++, etc. They are not theoretical subjects and shouldn't be converted to one.

10. Do away with the pointless subjects in the first year. My guess is that this system was first introduced in places where you decide your majors after the first year. It is not so in our system so why continue a pointless tradition. I have gained absolutely nothing with the knowledge of Engineering Drawing, or Chemistry, or Mechanics, or the silly Workshops. Keep 2/3 general and 4 core subjects per semester in the first year and start introducing electives from the 2nd year itself.

11. Do away with the Special Learning Programmes and Career Orientation classes. They are a waste of time and do not look attractive even on paper. In the same vein, do away with the Orientation programme for first years and hand it over to seniors instead.

12. Streamline the semester durations. We've started all odd semesters in different months. Start the odd semester from 1 August and finish in November end. Start the even semester from 2 January and finish in last week of April. Give May, June, July completely off in order to introduce point no. 13

13. Introduce voluntary industrial training after 2nd year and compulsory training after 3rd year. No company would be willing to take students for only 2 months in the summer. Hence a nice 12 week vacation is necessary. No need to assign credits for this. If our students start performing well in this training, the reputation of the college will automatically go up and companies will start coming for placements.

14. Now for non-curricular stuff. Dissolve all department clubs (ECO/MESA/CHESA/ACES...). If you want to keep them, don't allow them to conduct annual tech-fests. Most of the events are repeated and too much money and time is wasted. Let them conduct only talks/workshops/seminars related to their field. Also, either do away with the faculty co-ordinators or give more powers to them. Right now they only add to the red tape as all permissions need to be signed by the Director. If the faculty co-ord signs it, then whats the need for Director to sign it?

15. Once you've done away with the Prevoyances and Chemozales, introduce a techincal festival on the lines of Techfest (IITB) or Synapse (DA-IICT). 4-5 events related to each field of engineering. Some mega events. Allow anyone to sponsor the event. Keep one faculty in-charge of this event so that the entire organizing committee can report/refer to him/her for guidance. Call him the Dean of Student Affairs or something. He would have all powers and accept responsibility for anything related to the event.

16. Remove the ban on mobile phones. This is a place of education, not a jail. The population of students coming from far-away places is increasing everyday, and mobile phones have become a necessity. Of course, this does not mean that anyone can use mobile phones in class. Fine/punish the student who does so. If a student is talking in the canteen, what's the harm? If any student is caught taking pictures then do whatever you want. Finding a good mobile phone without a camera is not possible in today's word.

17. Improve the college website. This is the first thing a person/company would look at. Make all faculty put course material, assignments, solutions, tests, etc. on the intranet. Publish results on the net.

18. Introduce more transparency to the marks system. Make the exam department put a detailed report of all students on the intranet. How much did a student score in each assignment, test, MSE, SEE, Viva? What lead to him/her getting a particular grade?

19. Access to internet must be given in the labs. The internet contains a lot of useful information and is a 100 times better than our library. You can block all sites that you want to. In fact, you can get students to suggest ways to block sites. It isn't hard to block domains. Don't block 99% of the good stuff to keep out 1% of the bad stuff.

20. Make hostels for under-graduates in the campus. No college is complete without hostel. Besides providing a good facility to students, this will make students bond with each other and create a good atmosphere.

I hope someone from the college would read this and try to do something.

Akash

Farewell

Dear Arthur C. Clarke, I hope you are able to read this wherever you, just like Bowman could. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your books and wish you the best for the future.

I first came across Clarke in May 2001. I had gone to visit my Mama in UK after the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake. I visited the local library and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey lying in a shelf. I had always heard about the book, but never thought of reading it. I was just coming out of my Hardy Boys days and had started reading a few Robin Cook books. But 2001 was something special. I can't describe what I felt after reading the book, but I went back to the library immediately to get the next book in the series. Sadly, I couldn't find 2010 in the library. Instead I got a book called Richter 10. The book is never counted as his great works, but it remains the best Clarke book for me. The book, as the title suggests, is about earthquakes and 2 people trying to predict them. It was an amazing book. But I felt as if I was meant to come to UK and read the book after the terrible earthquake I had witnessed.

I came back to Ahmedabad a few days later and immediately bought all 4 books in the Odyssey series. I've asked the local bookstore at least a hundred times for Richter 10, but no one seems to have heard about the book here. After that I stopped buying science fiction. I think the Odyssey series was so awesome that I never felt the need to read anything else. Last December, I was in another bookstore in Ahmedabad when I saw The Collected Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke lying there. I couldn't resist the temptation and bought it right away. The book contains all the short stories (and some not-so-short stories) written by Clarke and is a breathtaking book. Anyone who calls himself (or herself, in rare cases) a science fiction fan must read this book. It took me almost a month to finish all the stories for even a 2 page short story had as much power as a 1000 page novel. I couldn't read more that 2-3 stories a day due to the sheer brilliance of the work. Each story sent me to wikipedia reading about Saturn's rings or Jupiter's moons or geosynchronous satellites and many things more.

This book made me want to read more science fiction and fantasy. So another trip to the store to buy Heinlein, Asimov, Pullman and yet another fruitless search for Richter 10.

I don't know why Clarke's death came as such a blow for me but it did. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I would add a corollary to that - any sufficiently good book is indistinguishable from magic. And most of Clarke's works fall into that category. So long Mr. Clarke, and thanks for all the fiction.

The Unfinished Tales - 1 (previously titled 'The Last Stretch')

I want to write something but feel too lazy, so am digging up an incomplete post from the drafts folder. I wrote this a long time back (sometime in October, 2007). Feels strange to read this now.
-------------------------

Only 19 days to go - 4 vivas and 6 theory papers and I can bid adieu to Nirma.

It's strange. I've been waiting for this since 3.5 years and yet I am quite sad when I should be happy. The last few days have been good for me. Getting placed in Motorola with a package I could only dream about when I joined Nirma.

I think I am sad as it is finally time for me to take control of my life. I've been lazy too long. In a few months I'll be leaving home, family and friends and try and build a new life in a new city.

-------------------------

That's all I managed to write at the time. Nothing much has changed since then - I'm still anxious about the future and I am still lazy.

Google talk translation bots

Translating from one language to another was a tough thing to do before Google Translate. But with Google translation bots, it has never been easier. All you need to do is add a bot as a friend on GTalk. For example, add en2es@bot.talk.google.com as your friend if you want help translating from English to Spanish. Once you have done this, anything you type to the bot will be echoed back in Spanish. Amazing, isn't it. With cheap GPRS/WiMax + Google talk client on your mobile, you will never need a translator again.

Happy New Year

Hello all. Wish you a very happy new year!

It's been 6 months since my last post. Wish I could blame writer's block - but I have only laziness to blame.

So many things have happened in the past few days and I felt I had to write something.

Modi won a landslide election. I wanted to blog about the election, and also wrote a few lines. But I never published the post and it lies peacefully in the draft-box. I had predicted that Modi would win in the post and also wanted to give a few reasons as to why I would vote for him. The counting is over and Modi is back. So I'll not say more about him.

I did some sightseeing in Ahmedabad in the last week of December. I went for the Heritage Walk of Ahmedabad with a few friends. It was a great experience and I recommend the walk to everyone living in Ahmedabad, especially people like me who have never lived in the old city. The walk starts every morning at 8 from the Swaminarayan Temple at Kalupur and ends around 2 hours later at the Jamma masjid. I've uploaded a few pics on flickr. You can have a look at them at http://flickr.com/photos/43964938@N00/sets/72157603543996027/. My only criticism of the walk is that is wasn't properly guided. Our guide hardly knew English, and didn't explain anything much on the walk. I would be willing to pay more for the trip (Rs. 20 right now) just to get a good guide. Wonder why they can't provide audio guides for the trip. I also went to the Adalaj step-wells a few days later. I was a bit hesitant about going to the place as I had heard lots of stories that the place was not well maintained and also that it stinked. But it was nothing like that. The place is an architectural marvel and was very clean on that day. If you have not seen the place recently, then I urge you to take a trip back. As with the Heritage Walk, the step-well is a must-see for anyone coming to Ahmedabad. I don't have pics of the place right now, but will upload them on flickr as soon as I get hold of them.

That was the last week of my blissful vacation. The past 2 months have been the most relaxing after my 12th vacation. There were hardly any days when I felt bored. No one believed that I woke up every morning at 6:30 to play tennis. I'm so glad I started playing the game and I hope to continue playing tennis as long as I am in Ahmedabad. Another thing I'm happy about is getting my laptop fixed. Those who have worked with my laptop would know about my crazy laptop. I have to keep windows media player playing some song as long as I'm working with Windows else my computer would hang in a few minutes. Sadly, that problem is not fixed, but I've installed Fedora 8 along with Windows and there's no such problem with it. My laptop fan too had a weird problem. It just wouldn't start by itself in the morning. So I had to keep checking the temperature and give my laptop a good whack when the CPU was hot enough. A few good whacks and the fan would start working and keep on working all day without any fuss. That problem is solved and the fan starts by itself.

The final semester of my under-graduation has now started. In my college, the 8th sem. is the Major Project sem. which means that we have to do a project either in the college or in some company. Doing the thing at Nirma was not an option for me, so I'm interning at Tata Consultancy Services for the same. I'm currently placed at TCS Gandhinagar and will be working on a non-government project. I'm not sure if I can tell you more about the project as I've signed a confidentiality agreement with TCS. :) I'm hoping that I can get the project in Ahmedabad so that I can continue with tennis and not drive 60 km everyday.

I guess I've written enough now to make up for the lost 6 months. So till then next post, au revoir!

Blogiarism

I googled "Obama whining" to check if Google had indexed my blog. To my surprise I came across this. A complete copy of my original post. I had no idea that plagiarism existed in blogosphere too. Don't know whether to feel disgusted or flattered.

Not the Final Countdown

My life is full of countdowns right now. 16 days left for college to really begin. 21 days to go for the release of Harry Potter 7. GRE in another 23 days. I will be off to Taiwan to attend Wikimania after 30 days. 4 months for CAT. Another 5 months in Nirma. 1 year left for B. Tech.

Countdowns like these induce anxiety and terror. Wonder if Dali felt the same way when he drew this. The painting is called "The Persistence of Memory" and is considered to be Dali's masterpiece.

Why is Obama whining?

Barack Obama, one of the Democratic Party's leading candidates for nomination in the 2008 US presidential election, made headlines recently when he released a memo criticizing the Clintons' relations with India and Indians. The memo was titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)'s personal financial and political ties to India". Examples of these 'ties' according to the memo are Bill Clinton accepting fees for speaking at Cisco. Now this makes Bill an Indophile because Cisco outsources jobs to India!

After a lot of criticism from the media and the Indian-American lobbies, Obama has now tried to distance himself from the memo . He now terms the incident as a "screw-up", "stupid" and a "mistake". But while he may have lost a few thousand Indian votes, he surely must have gained some respect from a lot of Americans who still see "outsourcing" as a major issue. John Kerry tried to play the same card, but thankfully he lost the elections.

Obama has been a surprise factor of this election, and could potentially spoil Hilary's party. There is tremendous interest in whatever Obama says, he has got a lot of financial backing, and he is closing in on Hilary's lead. So what does this mean for India?

In my opinion, outsourcing is not going to go away. It saves billions of dollars for American companies and makes things quite easy for them. People say that it is a win-win situation for both America and India. But I do not completely agree with that.

Outsourcing has benefited India tremendously. Thousands of engineers get employment. Take the example of Nirma. We had Infosys, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant, Accenture and HP together hire almost the entire batch. It wouldn't be wrong to say that without outsourcing, half of these students wouldn't have been placed. Also, a bulk of these companies operate entirely from India. Which means taxes, amounting to millions and billions, being added to the Government's kitty.

But has anyone thought how outsourcing might be hurting India? The work that is outsourced is mundane, boring, and far from cutting-edge. Can you tell me names of 5 applications made by Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Cogni or TCS? Are our brightest minds made for this? This intellectual castration? These are the thousands of students who would otherwise have never thought about taking a job, but would have thought about going to US for higher studies, or would have written the GATE exam to get into an IIT, NIT, BITS. I am sure all of you must have heard about this. I don't think NASA is going to have the same percentage of Indians ten years from now.

I am trying to find out some more bad points about outsourcing. And the surprising thing is that once you start thinking, you can think about many things. What about the effect on our cities? These are thousands of young people who are going to get a lot of money. Money which can buy lots of cars, gadgets, gizmos which ultimately are going to pollute something. Look at the state in which Bangalore is. I had gone to Pune in January. It took us more than an hour to travel a few kilometers from the IT park to the main city.

But my biggest worry about outsourcing is that it is just a temporary phenomenon as far as India is concerned. Things are great right now. But we need to cash in, fast. Because this golden goose does not belong to India. It will fly to whichever country provides the cheapest services. Right now it is in India. But with the growth South American countries like Brazil and Argentina, and European countries like Czechoslovakia and other former Soviet countries, things could be outsourced there too. Besides being geographically close, outsourcing to these countries wouldn't hurt American sentiments as much as outsourcing to India does. And the Chinese are learning English too. So it is up to us to create more golden gooses. There are signs that things may be changing. Some global software giants like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle have set up shop in India and do the same kind of work in India as in US. We also hear about gaming companies and animation studios started by Indians in India. The growth of Indian pharma companies and the news about various automobile giants setting up plants being set up in India is also a good sign. At least all our eggs are not in the same basket.

I may have exaggerated the drawbacks of outsourcing a bit too much. I hope I may be totally wrong about each one of those negative points.

GEB

As people who have attended my quizzes may know, I am in love with Google. There is nothing else which has contributed more to quizzing than Google and Wikipedia (more about Wikipedia in some other post). Till now, I have conducted quizzes with rounds based on Google Maps, Google Trends and even Google Doodles. So this post is dedicated to Larry, Sergey, and to what was once called BackRub.

You must be wondering what GEB (see title) has got to do with this. Well, a bit of googling would tell you that Geb is the Egyptian God of Earth. Indeed, Geb means Earth. So the GEB series in my blog would deal with interesting things that I find while browsing Google Earth.

Ahmedabad once looked quite boring in Google Earth. The resolution was very low and one could say that this was Ahmedabad only because the search told you that this was Ahmedabad. But things changed sometime in 2006. The imagery updated and suddenly you could identify individual localities, roads and even buildings in Ahmedabad. Like a kid with a new toy, I spent hours on Google Earth, traveling through the roads I saw everyday, marking all the buildings and roads I knew, and some that I didn't. I uploaded all the placemarks I had collected to the Google Earth Community website so that the whole world could figure out the where's where of Ahmedabad. But I soon got bored with it. The imagery has not been updated again. And my dream of seeing Ahmedabad like I can see Las Vegas remain just that - a dream. But today I clicked on a checkbox called 'roads' today and...

... I discovered that Google had been working while I was sleeping! All roads in Ahmedabad are mapped. Along with their names! Did you know that what we lovingly call Judges Bungalow Road is not wholly inaccurate? Officially that road is called Nyay Marg (nyay in Hindi means justice, marg means road).

So, Google does it again. And I have an improved version of my old toy to play with.

What next O Mighty Google? Ahmedabad in 3D?

Musings from Nirma

This will come as a shock for most of you who have ever passed through the gates of hell (read Nirma). I am posting from Lab B-104 of Nirma!

Yes, Nirma is providing us with Internet facilities. This is part of the resources provided to aid us in the Minor Project. But there is a catch - it is compulsory to use the resources. It is compulsory to sit in the lab from 8:45 AM to 4 PM. In true Nirma style, attendance is taken every 2 hours. All these rules have been decided by 'higher authorities'.

I have given up trying to figure out the logic behind these making us attend college regularly. Instead I spend my time checking my mail, reading news and of course, writing my true first blog post.

I need to sign out now. 'Higher authorities' may decide that blogging is illegal. Sometimes I wonder if Nirma is funded by the PRC.

Cheers!

Hi there

Hi folks,

This is my first blog. I will update more about my college, city and life in general later.