The Bombay Times

I can only lament on the state of our newspapers today.
Case in point The Bombay Times . Feb 27 2005
Page 1 An article about toursim in kashmir,an ode to dilip kumar, A question and answer on the mill lands by a sangarsh samiti representative and the views of some film personalities about the due budget
Page 2 and 3 devoted exclusive to celebrities. Though perhaps celebrities is too strong a word. sample the names of the people do you even know what they do ?
ashwin deo,dj aqeel,archana,gul panag ,harmeet gulzar and shefali jariwala,shonali shroff,shravan shroff,zulfi sayed
Page 4 ah the comics strips. something worth reading at last
page 5 news about the british royals prince charles wedding. Oh no i thought i had escaped then when i returned to india from london!
Page 6 and 7 cinema ads though page 7 has more celebrity interviews some western some local
Page 8 full page cinema ads
Page 9 interviews with vishal bharadwaj and shah rukh khan
Page 10 full page ad
And no this is not a Sunday Special. The only feature of note is the Question on Answer on Page 1 and the comic strips
Perhaps Bombay Time should rebrand itself as Bollywood Times.
Now i wonder how do i get an email of to malavika sanghvi

Slum demolition

There is recently a furore against the BMC's drive to clear Mumbai of its illegal slums (but only those after the year 2000). Evidently this drive is not humanitarian and the governement should not be going out demolishing the slums without providing them free alternative housing.
I find myself on the side of the demolitions.
It is simple the slums are illegal. By providing free housing/land whatever we are encouraging more slums. It is akin to catching a thief and on hearing his sad life story saying go ahead rob me and heres the keys to the neighbours house as well. The maid in our house , herself homeless but whose son lives in an illegal slum tells us how her son pays 4000 a month to a corporator. Poor indeed. It is also heard from the same source how these people sell the home they have got and go back to live in the same slums till the next time they are given another home.
Which is not to say that we should kick these people out and do nothing else . The skewed development in India has to be halted. It is silly that so much wealth is concentrated in so few places. And Mumbai is one of those places. We have to develop other places so that the people there do not feel a need to migrate to Mumbai to earn their living. We must do something about our population. While it continues to increase at this rate no amount of development will serve any purpose. And finally we must stop allowing politics and politicians to interfere in all our public bodies.

The times they are a changing

I just finished reading Tamas by Bhisham Sahni
It is a sign of how much India has changed that i do not think such a book could be published today .Or a TV serial made. There would be protests , probably the producers office would be burnt and the matter referred to the courts . Complaints from all the communities that they are portrayed in a bad light (How do you portray communities participating in a riot in a good light?). Complaints that this will stir feelings of hatred to various communities. And so on and so forth. Over the years we have become less tolerant towards fiction/art/literature. The rise of people who feel that they should choose for us to places of power where they can actually do so is troublesome.
And i now know the answer to a question
"India is not secular it is multi-religious. And I do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing"
The answer is No it is not a good thing. The tragic part is this were it any other way , it would not be India.

Secure Festivals

Two days ago was bakri id. While travelling to work on the company bus, we have to pass a masjid near teli gully. Opposite it were the cops in full force some 10 or so. The same arrangement I had observed near bandra station. Im not sure i had noticed this during my younger years(or do the old days always seem to be the good old days?). And you realise that we are currently living in uneasy truce. To celebrate any religious festival we need complete police protection. That the facade we put on of all religions living peacefully in India is just that - a facade.
And to quote BusyBee India is not secular it is multi-religious. And I do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing

A Dental Appointment

Have you ever noticed that everyone waiting in a dentists reception area have grim expressions writ large on their face. And it isnt necessarily because they have a tooth ache. Parents accompanying their children are also suitably mournful. And you can feel the collective grimace when the door opens and you can hear the dentists drill. The previous dentist waiting area was air conditioned with a peculiar smell that felt like you were entering the morgue. or at least this is what i think it should feel like when you enter a morgue.
This is one my irrational fears that try as i might i cannot get rid of. And i dont seem to be the only one. The world can be divided (like the lord of rings) into the people who are afraid of dentists and those who are yet to visit them. The dazzling array of sharp instruments .i always shut my eyes , in the mistaken firm belief that what i cant see cant hurt me.
And of this particular appointment the worst possible result.
An excruciating one hour wait. One filling . And an appointment for next week

On Countries

Religion. Language. Caste. Class. Race. Skin Colour.
People who discriminate or state that certain individuals are better or worse on any of the above criteria will be immediately branded as racist, bigots or some other suitable adjective by most people who can think for themselves.
However when it comes to countries this discrimination is almost universally encouraged. From the God Blesses America to saare jahan se accha hindustan hamara. People who believe that their country is superior to every other country are generally called Patriots (One who loves, supports, and defends one's country though this meaning does not hold in these times)
You have to respect any symbol remote connected to the country(e.g. anthem,flag, language etc.). You have to profess the opinon that your country is better than any other country (except if you are an NRI). You have to pass laws to protect your people, workforce, industry against those other people who are trying to immigrate to your country , trying to steal your jobs
You have to vociferously support your army , irrespective of the cause its fighting for. Anything less is the sign of a traitor. You have to overlook every problem that your country is facing because its still great.
Any problems in the country are always caused by a troublesome few , the vast majority are always good, honest god fearing people.
But i digress.
What is a country ?
Perhaps Another way to distinguish one set of humans from another (not that humanity has any shortage of ways to do this). Only this time the criterion is where you were born , what country your father belongs to or the amount of time you have spent in a place.
Who determined what the borders are
For my country it was

• Some kings from all over the world
• The British Empire
• Some Wars(still ongoing) with the neighbours

Im sure its the similar for other countries.

Who determined the symbols that will represent the country?

Individuals , sometimes committees , elected(sometimes) representatives

All in all this is not a state of affairs im particularly happy with. It offends me that if say i want to see the niagra falls , i need to get the canadian governments permission. Who can decide unilaterally whether it will allow me , and if so for how much time. The same of course holds for all countries.

really idiotic

Jana Gana Mana

The first time i read this i laughed till i read it in another couple of places and realised that Mr Sanjeev Bhatnagar was serious. Evidently he does not like the fact that the word 'Sindh' which as per Mr Bhatnagar represents the place and not the people, does not belong to India anymore and so should be replaced by some thing else (like kashmir?!) in India's national anthem the Jana Gana Mana.
My initial knee jerk reaction was that 'either use a different national anthem that satisifies your warped sense of patriotism , dont mess with someone else's poem'
After careful thought i have revised this opinion to 'I dont care'
That however does not prevent me from adding my two cents.
The supreme court has ruled asking Mr bhatnagar to take up his problem with the Government.
From the Times Of India these are Mr Bhatnagars views (or my interpretation of them)

1. Sindh is now a Pakistani Province and hence the use of it in our national anthem violates our constitution(Article 1 , Clause 2)
2. According to Tagore himself the word *sindh* represents the province and not the culture nor the people
3. Sindhis shouldnt be hurt as they should be calling themselves indians and not sindhis
4. There is no big deal changing a national anthem as the russians have done it , the germans have done it, and the situation now is different from 1911
5. That he is apolitical and would prefer to see saare jahan se accha as the national anthem of india
6. That our current national anthem is not a patriotic one ,there is controversy over who the vidhata is

The one good thing that has come out of all this is that i have finally looked up the translation of the Jana Gana Mana. I remember laughing at the corporators who could not recite the national anthem and i realise now that i was no better than them, i had only learnt the words , i did not understand what they meant just that standing at attention and repeating the words somehow made me a patriot.

Anyway more on that later. The reasons for my initial reactions were

There are numerous examples in Hindi Film entertainment and in our politicians deeds where someone else's idea's of patriotism is forced down our throats. This seemed to be another example. But for the points Mr Bhatnagar raises

1. Sindh is indeed part of Pakistan. I am not well versed in Article 1 Clause 2 so i do not know if it indeed is a violation.
2. If you read the poem the translation states that 'Thy name rouses the hearts of ........ Sindh' so i dont think Mr Bhatnagar is correct in stating that the poet intended the place and not the people.
3. His third point shows an astonishing naivete in understanding the Indian psyche even though technically he may be correct.
4. Other People do it cannot be used as a point for or against an argument
5. And Vande Mataram would be preferred by some sections and each and every song or poem that we chose would have its share of detractors.
6. A matter of interpretation. I would say that there is no doubt that Bhagya Vidhata does NOT refer to King George V

The Sindhi Community has reacted as expected ,that were treated unfairly in the partition(is there anyone who was treated fairly?) , that sindh is more than a geo political entity , it is a people, a culture, a civilisation. That Sindhi hearts glow with pride every time they hear the sindh word in the Indian National Anthem.

And all of the above leads to me my final views on the matter , I dont care what happens ,India is more than an anthem , a flag ,a language or a community.

Conflicting Criteria

Since the topic of my marriage keeps coming up and everyone has some advice on the qualities of the woman i should choose , herewith a list
The woman should be employed , self sufficient. Who knows what may happen in this world
The woman should be a house wife , that way she has plenty of time to look after you
The woman should be well educated . You can then have intelligent conversations with her
The woman should not be well educated. It would be hard to get your own way with such women
The woman should be city born - city bred. You should atleast have this much in common
The woman must be village bred - village born. What do these city girls know. They cant even cook to save their lives
The woman must be working in the IT industry. Only she will understand the hectic life
The woman must not be in the same industry. Otherwise you will both be working late hours never meet each other
The woman must be pretty. You should want to go out with her.
The woman must be smart. All the pretty ones are dumb
The woman must work in the same company as you. How else will youll spend time together
The woman must work somewhere else. How else will you make excuses about work without getting caught

Me i have only one requirement. She must be (you know who).

Indian Gods

The blind faith of people in the various gods and goddesses never ceases to amaze(and disappoint) me. Or let me rephrase that, The Blind faith of people in self proclaimed representatives of the various gods and goddesses never ceases to amaze. Case in point , when I visited a temple in Kollur (the mookambika godess) , all men had to enter her presence bare chested. There is of course no logical reason for this , but faith doesn't need any logical reason. Surprising the previous day we visited some other temple and of course there was no such restriction there. All the temples in India (or atleast in the south) are becoming increasing commercialized. There is a list of pujas with suitable prices attached varying from the Rs 25 to the Rs 2000. The gods (or their idols) are locked up at one end of a long dark passage and all one can do is peer at them from afar. Though that doesn't prevent thousands of devotees from prostrating themselves. The tirupathi temple earned a revenue in crores and is considering increasing the price of the puja's to well, earn more.
Indians seems incapable of differentiating between gods and between a priest/brahmin/mullah/bhatr who claim to know more than the rest, who claim to be closer to good and are able to put in a good word for the rest of us. perhaps we should give up the pretense and worship them instead.

The Reborn Rooster

An interesting village tale
I visited my uncles place in mangalore for the Christmas holidays(a village called tones in mangalore). Its a typical village and my uncle has a rooster and some hens. It seems that one day the rooster was caught by a fox which took it to its den. The villagers chased the fox to the den and presumably killed it.However the rooster was lying dead on the ground. They left it there, but the next day someone passing by heard the rooster making crowing sounds. It of course hadn't died yet. Someone returned the rooster to my uncle but the rooster was in a state of shock and refused to eat anything. It supposedly was given glucose(intravenously?) and is now fine.
I thought only cats had more than one life!

The second most durable species

I was reading 'The Tunnel Of Time' - R. K. Laxman's autobiography which had a quote which was something like
"Politicians are the most durable species"
And of course i could not help but make the inevitable comparison with my own profession that of a software engineer. Though perhaps not as durable as the politician we probably qualify as the second most durable species.

For example

Most of the projects / products delivered are late and over budget and buggy. And these are the successful ones. There are the spectacular failures that no one has heard of.

Everyone associated with the failed project moves on to better and bigger things (perhaps in a different organization). I haven't heard of anyone getting a demotion for his role in a failed project. Instead the person has more experience( a valuable commodity in the software industry). The fact that the experience is in screwing up projects is of course not considered

Both the techies and the managers have a ready excuse list why the failure was not our fault and how a combination of circumstance, other people, client etc.. was the cause of failure. Like the teflon coated politicians nothing sticks to us either

We make a living of the fact that the things we have delivered do not function correctly. (The maintenance cost of projects almost always far exceed the initial design and development costs).

We state it as a known truth that all projects/products will always have bugs. we are in fact quite proud of it.

We come of with fancy terms (e.g. refactoring) to cover our inadequacies and incompetencies. See for example XP.

• Fact software engineers are too bored/lazy/incompetent to keep code and documents in synch.
• Solution come up with catchy phrases like 'The code is the documentation'

• Fact it is really hard to design systems which are flexible and predict the future requirements.It is really hard enough to come up with a design that covers the current requirements.
• Solution come up with a cool acronym like YAGNI(you aint gonna need it)

We love repeating our mistakes. we love repeating other peoples mistakes. Just look at the number of substandard open source projects and the number of downloads they get.

So am i disillusioned with this industry?

Lazing at home vs work

Its ironic , everyone feels how i(city dweller) must be bored sitting in the village away from work with nothing to do and that i feel how nice i have nothing to do.
The Art of Doing Nothing is not easily acquired.

BusyBee

I have been reading the busybee collected works and reliving the memories that those articles contain. These articles have been inspiring me to write as well. After all if such simple writing can be so much fun to read , i should be able to write like this as well. Fame fortune here i come!. The above statement is of course a fallacy.
Its much harder to write simple humour with just a dash of sarcasm. If busybee were alive today he would have written something about the arrest of baazee.com's ceo. something along the lines of 'the chief has asked me to interview the server on which the bid was hosted'. Here all similarity between busybee's writing and mine ends. He would of course have written up the interview with a punch line. I cant think of what comes next. Being a software engineer means i can only come up(read copy) with jokes that would make sense to the software fraterntity making the entire article a damp squib.
ah well back to reading best of busybee for 1996 -97

Extreme Programming and Weblogic Portal

Some thoughts on using XP practices when having to develop on weblogic portal(7.0 sp2)
Unit Tests
How do you test webflows without writing a whole framework from scratch(mock objects or otherwise). when the time given for you to develop your application is about half of what it should be(at least!) do you have the time to write these kind of frameworks? why doesnt BEA provide some framework for unit testing IP/PC's out of the box. This should probably improve when portal moves over to struts completely since these things are available with struts
Moral of the story ? Use struts. But we cant always shift to better software. So whats the alternative besides not unit testing your code?have as little of it as possible in propietary interfaces/components(in this case pipeline components , ips) and have as little of these components as possible. Unfortunately i violate these principles on a regular basis.
Small incremental Changes to code, then tests
If you work in environments similar as i do , where the hardware for developers are limited and you have to share instances of weblogic portal with other developers due to licensing and budget limitations you have probably run into problems while following this.
a small change like adding a log4j debug statment takes about half an hour , due to the exceptionally slow time it takes to undeploy/deploy ejbs etc to the server. Couple this with the buggy behaviour(which has improved from 4.0)that sometimes you have to undeploy the whole application because of the classlaoder hierarachy means a long wait.
Moral of the story ? start your own blog and use the time to write rants.

Calvin and Hobbes

This line from Calvin and Hobbes so accurately describes me.
The strength to change what i can,The inability to accept what i cant, and the incapacity to tell the difference
On which topic, it is just so sad that Bill watterson stopped writing calvin and hobbes, but after rereading most of the collected volumes and all that he has said on the matter and especially the last strip
Its a magical word out there, Hobbes old buddy, lets go exploring. I do finally understand and its what i intend to do as well

Sue Spielman on Outsourcing

Well i couldnt resist. I said i wouldnt visit this blog again, but i did.
Outsourcing in my company? I don't think so.
The thread has degenerated into what i thought it would. The only person i seem to agree with is Frank Sommers.
Everyone will (i hope) agree that a problem exists. People losing their jobs anywhere is not particularly pleasant. However most of the "solutions"
do not seem to address the problem and the others are mainly offtopic. Where is the software engineering process of mapping out requirements and the way the proposed solution satisfies the requirements. Where is the impact on other systems etc?
The irony is that most of the people visiting this blog are software engineers and are involved in design/development etc. of systems. If we cant sit and come up with effective solutions that keep most people happy, what does that say for our system architect capabilities?.