Packet Loss

Just came back from (yet another) project "postmortem" on what went wrong and  I can't think of anything more apt than the picture bellow:

(I had seen an earlier version a few years back...but seems it had improved over the time...surely from the contributions of some witty volunteers!)

You'll really have to appreciate the baby-like innocence and naivity of some people:

from day one you start cutting corners everywhere...in budget, competence, time and definitely on quality...where you don't cut corners, but just leave (some of) the corners; whistle blowers are sick and tired of blowing their risk-sirens loud and clear to everyone's deaf ear.

Yet you headfastly go ahead to deliver the half (or quarter or even less) cooked things to the customers without caring a thing about the underlying technology. And then you're utterly surprised to see the resulting mess and innocently asked why!

But Cynisim apart, it's just amazing how much information is lost in transmission. As any  text book will tell you...performance will significatly be improved if you can reduce the number of hops.

May be getting rid of those Project Managers could be a good start!

Scarred

I met J- in a summer school in Denmark. She is doing her masters in physics in a university in Finland. When I casually asked her what brought her there, little did I expect the answer: it's the women-friendly soceity in Finland which prompted her to chose the place!

Now this is rather unusual. I have heard people opting to go for a post graduation abroad for brand names (Harvard, Yale or OxBridge), better research facilities and labs, chance to meet the frontiers of the field, to see the world and know different cultures. Even the potential for money or lucretive employment in future play important roles in such decisions. There could also be some personal reasons like family or boy/girl frieneds.

But a move steered by feminism? No, I've not heared it before. Esspecially when she had many other popular options like US or UK. She has done her bachelor's from IIT Delhi  and any institute in the world would be happy to have her as their master's student.

So I probed a little and what I discovered left me decidedly blue.

During her entire stay of 4 years in the Delhi IIT (or perhaps years before that when she was growing up in Chandigarh) she was discriminated against because of her gender. India is a secular country where the constinution vows to treat people equally irrespective of their race, religion or gender. Yet an elite institute like Delhi IIT imposed a rule that every girl returning back to the university campus after 10 pm would have to sign a logbook detailing why they " had to" go out. Obviously no such rule for boys returning back any time of the day!

Such arbitrary rules....just for the sake of the girls' "safety".....were all over the place and I can't blame anyone feeling suffocated in that atmosphere.

There  was even an incident of rape, not very far from the girls' hostel. The victim was not a student, but that is hardly comforting.

Everytime such a thing occurs, authorities come up with some more " rules" to ensure girls' safety, which essentially means some further restrictions on their basic liberty.

Probably this is not unusual in a country where the police chiefs and minsters publicly say that it is upto the women to prevent the rape and molestation; they should not go out in a provocative attire!

Of course there is no statistics showing girls in bikinies get molested more than those in sari!  Then since when the bigots care for facts!

So at the end of her final year, when she had to chose prospective places for further study, J- googled for the country with best records in feminism. Finland came first and she applied there!

Actual criminal cases can be statisticised, but what about numerous such incidents where young, active and intelligent girls are scarred for life? J- fled to Finland, not everybody can or is willing to take such drastic steps; but they live a life of continuous fear that something might happen to them if they are late at work or spend a couple of hours extra at a friend's place.

It is the competent and capable young Indians like J- who propelled the colonially destroyed country to the front row of global importance within 60 years of independence; and it'll be utterly stupid to lose potentially half of them due to mediaval mindsets of a vocal minority in the Indian soceity.

But most importantly, it's a question of civil liberties and basic rights of half a billion people which no one can ignore.