Ripples on the brain

My best journey ever on the bus should be the one between KL and Singapore. I have not had a chance to travel in those 180 degree seat or sleeper buses in India, so I wouldn’t know if such buses are available here as well, but I must say the comfort in the bus should beat that available to business class travelers.

We did an overnight journey when we went to KL from Singapore. The journey takes five and half hours including the immigration formalities. Since we had boarded the bus after 11pm, the scenery outside was not visible during our onward journey. Nevertheless the bus interiors were very comfortable, save for a guy beside me who was using the in-seat entertainment system. The seats were just too cosy and I just didn’t want to leave it even after we reached KL. I got the best glimpse of KL when a taxiwala asked, “Enga sir poganum, taxi irukku” (Where do you want to go, sir) in Tamil, as we got down! For a moment I thought I was in Guindy .

The return journey was, however, still better. This time we did a daytime journey and in hindsight that was the best decision we could have taken. The vegetation along the road were such a treat to the eye and were more scenic than those that you get to see along the Coimbatore - Palghat route. The road itself best fits Vadivel’s description of Dubai roads in “Vetri Kodikattu“.

During the return journey, the bus stops at a highway food court for refreshment. The juice stall in that place is one that is not to be missed. One must in fact taste all the juice options available in the stall as it is very unlikely that one gets better ones anywhere else in the world. Even when we were at the Batu caves, the tender coconuts that we had were amazingly sweet and has copious amounts of water inside. The way these coconuts are cut is itself a treat to watch. Unlike in India, where we use aruval (sickle), in Malaysia the sharper and rectangular butcher’s knife is used. The bottom portion is cut flat so that the coconut can rest on the table without support (Believe me, some of these are so big and heavy that you wouldn’t want to hold them, more so because you also take a long time to finish drinking!). It is cut deep so that you have a wider mouth with a zigzag circumference and served with a straw and a metal spoon. The mouth is so wide that the spoon can be used to scrape the coconut meat.

What made the journey more wonderful was when there was a slight drizzle as we neared Singapore. The sight of an overcast sky, fog covered hills far away and rain drop trails along the large glasses on the window provides the ultimate mental relaxation.

All-in-all a perfect journey!

Yes, Tamil New Year.

I think linguistic bifurcation of states in India has created an issue. People who rule the state (instead of serving the people) think they have an authority over the language and all people who speak the language. They have neither.

Hope other states do not follow this wrong precedent.

I don’t know why i have not been affected by the news of the shutdown of Woodlands Drive-in. I had been a regular to its premises during my earlier employment. My office was bang opposite to the restaurant and my colleagues and I visited it a few times in the evening when we had just enough time to hop across the median before that evening call with a client or an onsite co-ordinator.

I think one can never be loyalist of Drive-in’s food. I remember it was always pretty mediocre. Even the famed Chola Batura wasn’t very good. Though the restaurant was close by, it was never a place for family or team get-togethers. We usually had chat items when we went as a group in the evening. Mostly, there was too much pori in the Bhel puri and dosais sometimes had that raw smell. One of my friends who was sometimes teased for being very particular about food never liked the sambhar vadais they served in the evenings. It was always the case of getting a recently made vadai into the sambhar.

There were many other options for an evening bite in Cathedral Road. There was one shop that made very good sandwiches. That was a better hang out place for us. Bread Omlette was my favourite there. (I liked the mint paste he applied on the bread). There was also a roadside kaiyendhi chat corner where we used to get Bhel and pani puris. Then there was Gangotree, though all the stuff was pretty spicy there. I remember there was a north Indian restaurant, just beside Stella Maris that sold Aloo paranthas. I don’t know if that exists even now, but that was actually a reason we went to work on Saturdays. One of those paranthas served with curd and pickle would fill you for the rest of the evening.

The ambience of Drive-in, however, was amazing. Lots of green space in the heart of the city for parking or for just taking a stroll. Many a times, a stressful meeting was always followed by a coffee in the Drive-in to cool the tempers. I think it was a usual pit stop for all those people who had an appointment in the US Consulate across the road. I have seen singer P.B.Srinivas a lot of times there. I was told he came in the same auto and was served by the same person for a long time.

Hopefully, the Government uses it for the purpose it has promised.

There has been a lot of attention to the announcements about the creation of new IIT’s and IIM’s. As the Centre tries to get maximum mileage out of it, there has also been apprehensions about the “dilution of the brand” of these elite institutes. It is sad that details such as location, names of these institutes get more prominence while other important details relating to the quality of faculty, research, facilities in the institutes are not debated at all.

I wonder why it is really important to set up new institutions that have to be named IIT’s. Why can’t existing institutes / universities be beefed up through government aids so that their quality can be enhanced to the level of IIT’s or more? For example, instead of having another IIT in Tamil Nadu, why not take up a defunct university here and make a grand research and technical institute out of the same? The advantage these universities have is the existing space, infrastructure and set up. The name of the institute is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to make it a great one.

When I was in Singapore recently, I had this great fortune to visit the campus of Nanyang Technological University. I was amazed by the infrastructure of the University. We only visited the Electrical and Electronics Department and I can say, the department itself is bigger than most institutes in India (even the IIT’s and the IISc and definitely all the engineering colleges). The class rooms, lab facilities etc. can never be matched by any institute here. I felt blessed just to be in the campus and visit its facilities.

That visit made me and my father wonder about the engineering institutes in India and the direction we are taking. While doing my graduation, I had a chance to visit some of the engineering college campuses in Tamil Nadu during inter-college events. It was appalling, to put it mildly, to see their infrastucture. Many of them had six or so departments in a single building. Including classrooms, seminar halls, labs, staff rooms etc. And mind you these were some of the more famous private engineering colleges. Most the even government engineering colleges have zilch research activity happening in their campuses. I wonder if it is this lack of academic activity that frees up the college adminstrators time and effort and makes them concentrate on other aspects like discipline and decorum .

As the Anandakrishnan Committee recently pointed out, even a premier university like the Anna University has been relegated to a governing and exam administering body. Universities end up this way because there is almost no other constant source of funds for them. The lesser said about the engineering colleges and deemed universities, the better. When I graduated, many of my classmates ended up as lecturers in one of the self financing colleges in TN. One friend even told me, just 6 months after we graduated, that if only he had a Masters degree, he would have been the Head of the Department; all the other colleagues were less experienced than him!

I wonder how regulating bodies like the AICTE allow such institutes to function when even lay persons like me can spot so many gross violations in these colleges. Instead of cracking whip on the technical institutes, AICTE seems to be hell bent on bringing some better-run non-technical institutes under its fold.

While it is common knowledge that under-graduate level education is so poor in India (apart from very few elite institutes), little is being done to remedy the situation.

I clearly have my doubts.

Around 2004-05, I too caught this craze for orkut and social networking in general. I joined communities of “like-minded” people, chatted with them for hours together, met them over a coffee and so on. While I did make some new friends and establish contact with some long-lost friends, mostly, it was just another user id and password for me to remember and while away my time if I had nothing else to do.

I guess things started turning for the worse after Google took over orkut. Google then mandated having a unified id and password for gmail and orkut. Social neworking was suddenly over-hyped and all these orkut clones started appearing. People unsuspectingly gave their email ids and passwords to these phony sites and they then had a field day flooding inboxes. Around this time, some bloggers started criticizing these sites and users of orkut who send these funny “franship” requests.

Over the last 6 months or so, I had restricted my orkut usage for birthday reminders and greetings. All these bulk scrap messages started increasingly appearing in my scrapbook. Some contained greetings from friends but there were others that had some magic scripts to increase friends, send bulk messages, identify others who had crush on you and so on. If this was not discomforting enough, today I discovered that I had automatically become member of more than a couple of communities. I checked these communities and found that all these had started only on the last week of February 2008 or so and many had more than 5000 members. One community, started after Feb 15th. had 68000 members and aptly, promised its members that it will teach them orkut tricks!

Clearly, Google’s attempt at increasing security (through locking features built recently for profiles, scrapbooks, photos and so on) hasn’t helped. It is increasingly becoming more and more vulnerable with the increased usage. Over the next week, I will seriously consider deleting my orkut account. The friends list has swelled so much that I don’t think I can use orkut for any meaningful networking any longer (oh, not that I did so much earlier )