Engineers

Note: I posted this on my blog first, then figured I’d open it up for discussion 

Shashi Tharoor commented on engineers this Sunday, in response to a sociology study that made me go “Holy wtf maderchod”. The easy link is here. The study itself is here. Its findings: for reasons unknown, a fantastically large number of Islamist terrorists are or were engineers. This includes OBL himself, the two pilots during 9/11 and some 40-60% of currently documented fundamentalist terrorists.

Why is this so ? The sociologists give some vague fundaes about the Engineering mindset and what not. My take – Frust Extremis or pure absolute frustapa. When you’re frustrated enough, who knows what you can do ?

Arun

PS: Perhaps Jehadi wasn’t the best nickname for Amit after all. He’s an engineer

Parenting in the IITs

This article was published last week or so in Livemint India: http://www.livemint.com/2008/03/20232056/IIT8217s-new-social-network.html.

It’s basically the writer’s perspective on how IITians at Bombay sit on their asses all day Net-surfing. Apparently, there’s a net access cut at specific periods, when they’re correspondingly forced to do social stuff. She writes on the positive effects of it.

My points:

• We all know the Net is an addiction. It’s like what TV was a generation ago. The logic of “Go out and get some fresh air. Go do something” applies here too. So, to talk like we’ve no idea about this, or that we’re a bunch of sodabuddi-wearing Quake-playing masturbaters is idiotic
• I would like to know precisely who the admin thinks it’s ”minding”. Because that’s what this is – a patriarchal attitude that assumes we are 18 year old breast-feeders or something. It’s one thing for them to not give us Net access for budget reasons. That’s fine. It’s also OK to block Literotica, Girls-gone-wild and so forth, I suppose. But to cut off access saying “It’ll distract you from studies” (like they did in Guwahati) or “You need to go out and hang out more or do something” is very very condescending. We’re aware of our choices. We choose to waste time or not do irresponsible. And institutes have no right to police that.

Bloody next thing you know, they’ll start saying “No short skirts and jeans on campus”, “Boys sit here girls there”, “Study hours on in the hostel” and God knows what else.

No deliberate, intentious propaganda

I had heard about this chap Koenraad Else (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koenraad_Elst) but never read his articles. I found this website which have a collection of them.

http://www.bharatvani.org/books/

Interested guys can have a read.

found this interesting piece …

powered by ODEO some new chap from bangalore … my namesake .. raghu dixit .. but the music is cool !!!

Interesting video

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/131 – Courtesy Jaini. Pretty cool I think.

Awesome skit – IT Mafia (Hindi)

Can’t stop laughing

These guys are brilliant!

-cheers

leela krishna

An interesting case study.

I visit a restaurant near my office on quite a regular basis. Named X (name hidden, coz the case study is my creation), it boasts of being the best vegetarian outlet on M.G.Road. And I believe they face a small issue now.

All that I write could be hypothetical, and meaningless for some. Nevertheless, it could be food for thought for the rest.

Now X, when it started off, was sparsely populated primarily due to the lack of good advertisement. It gained ground on that part, but still wasn’t able to ping in a major crowd. The reason – M.G.Road is a place where corporates would come out mainly for their lunch, at all other times, they simply dont find enough reason to roam around.

X catered to a multi-ethnic group, and has a whole range of Indian veggie cuisine available. However, a mid-day meal (they call it as an executive thali) costed 80 bucks. X soon realised that to popularise their place, they need to introduce something new, and they did. The South Indian thali that they are providing costs 50 bucks, and thats the price which a majority of unlimited course lunches at offer on MG Road.

They then had to assure themselves that the taste should be sufficiently good in order to pull the new customers. Unsurprisingly, they have achieved that off late.

What bothers me although is the loss of some customers at the same point. With comparatively longer serving times, X has an issue of stuffing in more people in its space. They have two constraints, neither can they afford to increase the floor space to accommodate more seating capacity, nor can they increase the waiting line capacity. As a result of it, they have started losing customers on a regular baiss, those who wait outside for eternity and decide to move on as one always has options on M.G.Road. What more, this has adversely affected their customers who not only come for their lunch but also their evening snacks.

Can anyone provide a good solution wherein they can retain their present customers, and at the same time afford to continue with the attraction of a thali ?