Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2007

Humour:A conversation between Presidents Kalam and Musharraf that never happened

(Indian President A.P.J Abdul Kalam invited President Musharraf of Pakistan to a meeting. For good measure he suggested the meeting be organized over video-conference. Since Aiwan-e-Sadr did not have VC facilities. Bush bailed him once again and Musharraf took a flight to DC to take the VC from the White House) It was 6:30 PM IST, which was 9 AM EST. Kalam : Good morning Your Excellency. Musharraf : Good morning President (Musharraf forgot the time difference). Kashmir…..(cut short by Kalam) Kalam : Yes, Kashmir. Few minutes back I was in the herbal garden of Rashtrapati Bhawan, where we have some of the herbs especially brought from Kashmir. The ancient science of Ayurveda, emphasized a lot on the importance of herbs in our life. They give you vitality(pauses and sips something, which he emphasizes is Kashmiri drink Kehwa , organically grown). Infact, you must take a pledge that you would only consume herbal products. I have a pledge for you(picks up a card next to him but is cut sho

Coming up next - C.K.Prahalad

I heard CKP at an academic event couple of years back and was stuck by a mesmerizing presentation he gave on what appeared in the bookstore later as "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". As a logical sequel, this book appeared on the shelves of a colleague a months back, and I have helpfully borrowed it, without giving my colleague the chance to say no. So next few days, I will have this highly talked about book for bedtime reading. Shall certainly write when I finish, which I am hoping will be by end of next week. Updated: Here is the post.

A beautiful parable

My friend Rajeev Singh sent me this beautiful parable from Durban.Cannot resist posting this, since this shows the true contrast between good communication and better communication. The beauty in the message is its sheer simplicity.Here it goes. A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: " I am blind, please help. " There were only a few coins in the hat. A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words. Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were u the one who changed my sign this morning? What did u write?" The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what u said

ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 Programme

Based on feedback received from scholarly observers of the game of cricket, ICC has made some changes in the upcoming 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup. The tournament will be kicked off by vivid culturals, followed by the Award Ceremony, where the cup would be presented to Australia.

Open Source moves on, and c,mm,n, here's a car

Wikipedia defines Open Source as follows: "Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice." Note the broad definition.However, in common terms, Open Source is widely perceived to be something related to software, worse still, Microsoft vs Redhat. So, when I read about a car being made ' Open Source ', I halted to read about it. At the Dutch auto-fair Auto RAI 2007, The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment and the three technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente launched what was termed as their stimulating vision on mobility. In plain language, three universities have come together to design a car on the collaborative movement called Open Source. The car of the future is called c,mm,n (pronounced ' Common '). Essentially, that would mean, collaborative, shared designing of a car(' a car ' -isn