Über Italien fahren wir nach Berlin

And Germany makes it to the semis! We go crazy in princeton park and cant speak any more due to all the shouting (beer). Ironically the event at princetonpark is sponserd by Carlesberg, a Danish beer company. More plus hopefully some pics later! Right now off to watch the Italy Ukrain game!

Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi!

And Australia makes it to the "8th-finals" in the FIFA world cup by pulling an official draw against Croatia. Actually they shot a last goal in the last seconds, but it wasnt given, either because it was an offside or if the time was over I dont exactly know.

To call that game nail biting is to call the Alps amusing! It was a war on the field, both teams had to make it through to the 8ths, they knew their chances would be slim after the 8ths, but getting there was their target. Australia needed just to tie the game, while Croatia had to actually win the game. They fought till the end, it was a bloody war out there, with 3 red cards and innumerous fouls and yellows.

Cant wait to see Australia in action again on Monday.

All the details + videos here: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/w/match/template.html?id=44&day=22&month=06&year=2006

Attrition and Quoatas

We cant get enough of them can we? Quoatas are hot topic nowadays. And in recent news, Infosys has taken the first step towards volountary action:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1669466.cms

They will get SC/ST engineers and train them in order to "compete on their own merit" and the center hopes that this move will allow the sc/st ppl to "remove the myth around meritocracy". And I hope it does.

And in related news, Cognizant voices its severe attrition fear. So do other companies in India in face of a talent crunch and global competiton.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1669723.cms

In such waters, its better to do what the smart ppl do and fish the not so smart fish out first. Tapping and SC/ST sector, providing them with training and having them working in the private sector will increase diversity of the workforce, provide talent specific trained employees, and might serve as an attrition buffer!

Fegen

Its the culture of a place that defines it, and truly puts a meaning behind the faces of the people. The Germans have a rather interesting way of celebrating the 30th birthday of an unmarried male.

The point of the whole excersize is to dress up the birthday bachelor in crowd attracting costumes, parade him right throug the city, and make him clean the stairs of the Rathaus(The city council house) untill a virgin maiden kisses him and relieves him from his pain. And ofcourse, maintain a high body alcohol level all through the endeavor.

Joerg (some of you know him from my marriage), just turned thirty this last week, and we did the whole works for him. Here are some photos of the day...

Joerg is a fellow aerospace engineer, a Tech alumni, a hobby pilot and a mega fan of Apple inc.. So this is what we dressed him up in...

You see Joerg here, with his brilliant flight cap and ray-ban sunnies on his newly acquired German engineered single propellor plane sporting a georgia tech Tshirt with name tag George P. Burdell and a chain with the new Apple ibook on it. The plane is complete with little wheels on his shoes. The passing of his brand new red plane is D-JSD, standing for Deutschland-Joerg Stefan Dittrich.

Here we see Joerg performing a well orchestred way point directed steady and level starboard turn:

Joerg also was the sole partcipant in the unofficial "Red-Bull" race around the old church near rathaus. Complete with manned obstacles which would move.
Joerg cleaning the stairs of rathau with his standard issue a/c cleaning brush no. 1. He had to drink atleas 4 straight shots of schnapps in order to be promoted on to the next level of Brush.
Being as interesting as he looked, and given the general lack of atleast adolescent virgins in Germany Joerg had to look for other options. Being as smart as he is, Joerg didnt have a problem in finding a very cute young virgin that would kiss him and relieve him of his mission. You see Joerg landed here and trying to convince the little woman to give him a peck on the cheek.
And succesfull he was. We followed up the Fegen with a nice little barbeque in the park.

Chidambaram on reservations

Chidambaram interviewed over reservations

some quotes

"Among all the instruments available to us for affirmative action, the one that has proved most effective is reservation. The experience of Southern states tells us that. It all began in the state of Mysore, 75 years ago, in Tamil Nadu we have had reservation now for almost 60 years. Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have all had reservation and they have succeeded. Once you get a set of parents from the backward communities who are educated, then one finds the second generation child is able to compete more effectively with children of families, with 200 years of unbroken tradition of learning."

More musings on quota

I had some comments, and I realized that i had left my earlier reply unattended, so here are some more musing, I totally welcome your suggestions comments, as long as you think levelheadedly, and not with prejudice in your mind!

Ok, first of all there is huge misconceptions in the discussions regarding quoata, ppl are mixing everything, they are prejudiced and not looking out of the box.

Let me elaborate my position first. First of all, I am not living in India right now, so I have a sort of a more independent analysis of the whole thing, not being bugged by the day today problems of Indian life I am at a position to paint rosy pictures, as some of you have said. But then again on the other hand, since I have been away, and seen the rosy pictures of Europe, US, and Australia I am definatley in a position to compare the life here and over there, and recommend that on many accounts life in India is rather bloody better. Let me restate my stand:

1. Cheap labour: kaamwali, eating out, travel, hoteling, netcafe, plumber, garagewallah, home delivered vegetables are distant dreams in western countries.
2. Roads are better in western countries, not much you can do abou that but wait untill the infra projects are finished. But really, come on what did you expect, a whole make over of India in a week? We have had good developments in these years, comeon, thers the NH4, Delhi-Jaipur road, airport privatization, declaration of special vehicles for infra project.....
3. Power: Maharashtra has major power problems, but the govt is trying to work on it, plus thers the nuclear deal, not that it will bring much, but it atleast shows govts commitment.

Plus other thing, point being, India is developing, and currently its much cheaper than western countries. There are a hell of a lot of benifits in living in India.

The most imp point being, these things have nothing to do with quota row. Neither do the quality of quoata doctors/engineers/nurses has to do anything with allocation of quoata. You see, you need to think like the policy makers do, the problem of affirmating a low socioeconomic class of the society and the problem of ensuring that the result of the affirmative action are good (i.e. quality doctors, engineers etc) are two independent problems for them. Infact, the latter is more or less the problem of the education system, which is also under a revamp.

The govt imposes quoata on unis, unis take students, students dont pass, the govt doesnt make the unis pass the students! If the student is crappy, then he will be crappy all the way through, he wont get his first job in the private sector (atleast not yet) And even then, crappy students are good, many HR ppl prefer crappy students, because they can be made into loyal employees, Give them a job and a salary more than their worth, get them used to the good life and then hang a sword on their head of job loss! You got urselves a class A loyal worker. Stops attirtion, plus, a lot of jobs dont really need brains!

You see, the govt is just allocating quota, it is unfortunate that the quota ppl are still scoring less than the open class, why coz there is less competition. And thats exactly what the policy makers want to change, the competition in quota! The issue of giving quoata seats and the problem of making sure that the quota ppl themselves become competent are two different problems. We have to understand it. Quotas will become as competent as the open sector in the future, when more and more quota ppl start applying for jobs. In any case, the quotas are supposed to be in the proportion of the spread of population right! Well not really right now, but the courts are looking into that.

Plus some ppl mentioned something about bad infra, I dont understand what that has to do with the quota problem, tomorrow you will blame the excess rains on quotas!

Anyway, I was talking to an IIT prof the other day, and I asked him whats the deal with quota and how do they filter quota student, here is the algorithm he told me:

1. Set a cutoff lower than normal intake, say if the normal intake is at 90 of 100, then quota cutoff is 70
2. If the quota fills then good else set anather lower cutoff, say at 50 but do not admit those students directly to first year, rather have them go through one year refreshment course and make them sit an exam at the end, usually 50% of students make it through.

THe most imp thing is that these cutoffs are decided before the exam is set. The prof also said that many-a-times the qutoa seats are not filled at all. Hence the problem is not quota, but the proper implementation of it.

A lot of us are also confusing financial aid with affirmative action, and suggesting that quotas should be allocated on financial need. There are two problems with this argument, first of all, financial aid is a totally different problem and it should be handled independently of caste issues. Secondly, financial aid is NOT affirmative action, affirmative action is aimed at increaing the confidence of a treaded upon class of the society, while financial aid lends crutches of money. If you affirmate with financial aid you tend to run the risk of losing, why? because as soon as the benificiary are above the financial aid limit they dont get financial aid, hence that makes them lazy and makes them stay below the financial aid limit. Just like its right now in Germany with the jobless claims problem.

And finally, we seem to forget that we are living in a country where the majority need financial aid, then my dear friends, if seats were reserved on financial needs, there wont be any left for you and me!

Tubas and Test Tubes

Recently ran into this chapter from Thomas L. Friedman's book "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century"

In this chapter he uses the Georgia tech model to education in describing the new type of engineers that are required for top notch jobs. He recognizes the need for broader thinking individuals, who have the capacity to realize the needs of a diverse class of communities into reality through technical experties comibned with the necessary communication and integration skills.

Some excrepts

Don't send me engineers who can be duplicated by computers, I am sending that work to India. Send me engineers who are adaptable, who can think across disciplines.

What the Georgia Tech model recognizes is that the world is increasingly going to be operating off the flat-world platform, with its tools for all kinds of horizontal collaboration

The full chapter is here:

http://www.gatech.edu/documents/excerpt_the-world-is-flat.pdf

Reply to the letter to the Prime Minister

I recently read this letter written to the PM over the quota rows by a student residing abroad:


http://chhokra.blogspot.com/2006/05/letter-to-prime-minister-manmohan.html

I object, and here is why:

Why kid yourself, even without reservations Indian universities dont match up in terms of research and infrastructure to good unis outside, especially in the US. IIT grad school especially, needs to change a lot. There is something wrong that goes much deeper than quota rows, I think it is high time to stop crying about who got what quotas and look for alternatives.

Plus, if everyone, including the opposition is supporting quotas, then we dont have much choice do we? and the other thing is we need to see if we are missing out on the big picture or not. Afterall, affirmative action is supposed to serve a purpose. The whole problem is not affirmative action, the problem is lack of quality institutes to cater for all the students. US, Germany, Australia have excess of seats, and we are dying for seats, that my friends is the problem, not affirmative action.

It is time to increase the number of quality institutions, either by privatizing (regulating and privatizing) or by simply continuing the export of Indian students abroad, and then luring them back with higher wages/benifits/cost of life. You can kid yourself as much as you want, but you know that living standards are far better in India in terms of services (kaamwaali, driver, plumber, dentist, medicine), hospitality( restaurants, going out, movies, travel), and consumer goods (food, clothing) and Indian salaries give high buying power for the qualified individual, much more than American or European salaries. The only thing you will miss is infrastructure, which is improving day by day in India. Plus you got over 10 airlines to choose from, so stop crying about bad roads. Clean roads, pollution, poppulation etc is not going to go away in a day due to removal of affirmative action, so its not relevant here.

I agree that Indian politicians are playing the affirmative action game to lure voters, but you cant really blame them, considering most of Indian society does consist of backward caste, higher caste have always been the minority. They play for power, its their job! Plus, it is important to bring the lower caste ppl up, yes there is a creamy layer in the cities, but that is a very small fraction of the lower caste.

I dont want to judge anyone, but for me it has become apparent that affirmative action is something we have to live with, The courts might decide that it is exorbitant, and reduce the quotas (highly unlikley) but they are not going to manage to abolish them. If the govt is saying that its going to increase seats, let them. Yes, it will be hard to transition to higher number of seats in a year, but in the long term it makes sense to have more high quality seats anyway.

Its really easy for a well brought up higher caste guy to pass judgments on the lower caste, and say: " oh that guy with reservations got in COEP with lesser marks than me", without realizing the whole big picture that unfolds behind. But I say that even if the quota system helps only 10% of the worst hit backward class to climb up the social ladder, its worth it, every bloody seat of it. True there is the creamy layer, but quoatas are a big factor in letting it become creamy.

Hence, it seems highly unlikely that we are going to be able to abolish affirmative action, atleast in our lifetime, so lets look for alternatives. What do you guys say?

The most attractive alternative right now is to enforce the proper following of caste quota, and ensure that those who really need affirmative action are getting it, and not the so called creamy layer who seems to relaxedly mooch off of the reservation system.