Questions : Measured Approach

Is science just another point of view?

Most of what we say as natural laws or theories of science are based on empirical findings. So, the question implores you to clarify if empirical findings can be taken as absolute truth. You might as well say that science is just good statistical analysis at play. The answer as always is with you.

What is the one thing you would like to change in the world?

Your answer could be anything. Something as basic as end of global hunger or as dramatic as a world with no national boundaries. Take any 'bit of change' you want to see and ask yourself if the cause is your own or is it of a significant value to you.

Are you taking any steps to affect the change as answered above?

Well, we all want a million things in life but those wishes are just that, mere wishful thinking if we don't act or make a systematic plan to bring our dreams to fruition. You can take baby steps, it doesn't matter as long as you are moving at least a bit forward everyday.

[Image : https://medium.com/@chrisgardener/the-1-principle-998b33512100]

Are you measuring your progress?

As the famous saying goes, "what gets measured gets improved". If you are not measuring your steps then perhaps your outcome will also be random. So, ask yourself what tools or methodologies are you employing to track your progress in the mission of your life as answered above.

So, when can we see that change you are about to bring in this world?

Setting an end date to any activity gives it life. Think about humans or any living being, we die because we live. So, if you put an end date or expiry date you have given your vision a life, which will turn into a mission.


Thanks for reading the third and final part of my series on Questions.
Read Part 1 & Part 2 if you have missed them :

Questions : Ab Initio

Questions : The Gender

Salary : 'safety trap'

A steady stream of cash at the end of the month known as 'salary' is the biggest deterrent to entrepreneurship. It may seem that it provides a safety net for founders who are not necessarily sure about their business model/execution plans but it is actually a 'safety trap'.

Just take the plunge. Leave your job. Spring up your bum from the cozy cushion you have been gifted by the company for working 10 hrs overtime last year. Ideas flow in ether. Grab any idea, execute it with your heart and leave the rest of the part to the market/customer. As market decides the winner.
After all, customer is the king! Hai naa?  

Rashmi bansal: Hungry and Foolish Experience

“Sunil Handa can convince you to jump from the top of a 3-storeyed building” says Rashmi Bansal at a guest lecture organised by the Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur. Yes, she was here!

It felt as if Rashmi bansal took it from where Sunil handa ended when he paid a visit to IIT Kharagpur earlier this month.
Rashmi bansal’s book “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” has crossed the 100,000 copies mark in just 9 months of its release.



She gathered the attention of the full-capacity audience by disapproving the concept of an MBA-degree for being an entrepreneur.
“What we learn in MBA is all common-sense and any graduate from a reputed college/university really doesn’t need to spend two more years with formal college system. As a matter of fact, most of the successful entrepreneurs don’t have MBA-degree rather many of them are college-dropouts. The scene is that most of the MBA degree holders work for big MNC’s in posh parts of the world. The very concept of “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” was to cover 25 IIM-A graduates who chose to tread the path of their own dreams and in process became successful entrepreneurs. The book just tries to defy the myth that an MBA can’t be an entrepreneur.”

She talked about the “Naukri.com” founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani. Bikhchandani’s idea saw the daylight when once he visited an expo and it immediately striked to him that the “Internet” can be used to commercially exploit the “job-seeker market”. However, this idea didn’t materialize in just few days or months. It took him 3-4 years to get funding; he had this idea of a “Job-advertisement business model” from the days he used to discuss the various openings of “Business India’s Job Ads” with his colleagues.

Rashmi gradually moved to the important aspect of patience and perseverance with entrepreneurship; it may take more than 2-3 years to taste the fruits of success but the hard work should never be ceased. The point is “your idea might be best for you” but you also need to convince the consumer to whom you would be selling that your product is unique and can make their lives better. Something related to alternative energy might not be a hot-selling product but gradually it is bound to get acceptance and approval so have patience and have a “10 year target”; project your growth strategy for 10 years and work efficiently towards it.

After your “start-up” gets across the initial barrier of “doing good business” it can either become a big venture or a small enterprise but we all need to compromise with few things and as it goes “Small is beautiful”. Happiness and money are not always interrelated. If you are lucky you might end up being the other “Narendra Madhusudhan Murkumbi (Shree Renuka Sugars)”. Rashmi Bansal also threw some light on the “Murkumbi-billionaire story”, which is not about any new IT innovation but a result of smart business strategy. Her words echoed my thoughts “Innovation is not about doing something new but doing the same thing in a new and efficient manner.” Every Idea is a good idea till you give your commitment and have smart ways to tackle and manoeuvre your way out of troubles in your entrepreneurial path.

The “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” author also discussed about an IIT-Guwahati guy who convinced private car owners to carry advertisements on their valuable asset for anything between 25 Paise to 1 Rupee. He used an orkut community for his initial research while he was studying at IIT. This example of this entrepreneur gives us a strong message that online presence though necessary should be used primarily for advertisement, marketing and market research rather than creating a web-portal and following the cliché-path.

Even after all this valuable experiences and “entrepreneurship-gyan”, you may fail to achieve what you aspired for but you shouldn’t lose your enthusiasm and stop your entrepreneurial pursuit just because of fear; fear of failing. And as the famous saying goes, “The fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself”.
Most business failures are a result of interpersonal problems between partners. This leads us to a very important aspect of entrepreneurship, the “choice of partner”. Ideally partners should complement each other and drive the venture forward.

She talked about the importance of career counselling by citing her experience. Later, she started shifting her focus towards personality development and “listening to our inner call”.

“Many people have no idea whatsoever about what and why they are doing. We should fall in love with our business-idea and try to be an expert in that.” Now, she plunges into her personal experiences and says how she used to write a lot about various careers and eventually joined TOI for 2 years. Daughter of a scientist, Rashmi bansal completed her graduation in economics from Sophia College, Mumbai and further studied at IIM- Ahmedabad.

After working for TOI, she started JAM- youth magazine attributed to her childhood interests of reading a book daily and sending articles for the editorial section of newspapers when she was a college student. JAM was started with a modest "50,000 Rupees" capital investment in the servant room with the purchase of a computer. She along with few other people designed a dummy 16 page magazine and tried to strike deals with companies for advertisement spaces in JAM-magazine. Pepe was the first sponsor. The lesson learnt by Rashmi was that you do not need to have a venture capitalist funding your innovation but constraint of resources takes out the best from a person. She has learnt everything from “0”. Success should have a personal definition.



She knew that writing is her passion and after “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” she realizes that her purpose in life was writing this book.

FYI, Rashmi Bansal's next book is coming in next 2 months.





She bid adieu to us by saying that we must and are capable of doing few crazy things in our life so why not be an entrepreneur and “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”?

Sunil Handa : "Are You Just a Bloody Employee?"

Now, you are in an engineering college or some professional course or you might end up with one pretty soon. What next?
“A decent satisfying lucrative job in an MNC.”
“An MBA degree just after graduation”
“Some more professional courses which could get you a job”

The question I need to ask you is, “are you born just to be a bloody employee?”
By the time you have read till here, you would be cursing me as “just another IIT undergraduate student giving a sermon on entrepreneurship”.
However, these words are not mine. I’m just paraphrasing “Prof. Sunil Handa” from IIM Ahmedabad.



Sunil Handa came to IIT Kharagpur today and took the renowned Laboratory for Entrepreneurial Motivation (LEM) class with much fervour and filled us with motivation to become successful entrepreneurs.
I also don’t want to be a mere employee for the rest of my life and it got resonated with Sunil Handa’s words. He reaffirmed my belief that multi-national companies just exploit our talent and most important phase of our life (20-35 years); and are detrimental to the personality of a gifted person.
The question you need to ask yourself is “will you be happy with a boring, glorified, clerical job throughout your life?”

“Keep questioning, keep improving”

After reading this far, I hope you must have either got a feeling of “stop-reading-this-shit” or if not then proceed.

He threw light on various aspects of entrepreneurship. He told his own story as how he managed to persuade his father for his business aspirations. He laid a lot of stress in the choice of partner and the number of co-founders. Ideally 2-3 is the best. Though, partnership comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Partnership helps you to achieve 100 times more than what you are capable of; the synergic effect.
However, partnerships are bound to break some day or the other. You should be ready to face this reality. The choice of business partner still remains as important and pivotal as choice of a compatible spouse.
The most hindering stone in the path of entrepreneurship is “acceptance”. Acceptance by society; acceptance by family, acceptance by friends and the list never ends.
However, acceptance comes with time and success, as parents in most of the cases are not very specific about your choice of career; they only want your happiness.


He talked about how he saved millions of rupees by just having a proper outlook of the world.
He also validated the need of an MBA degree from a top college; it improves one’s personality by leaps and bounds.
To sum it up, “I don’t want to be a bloody employee!”
Do you?

If you are an IIT-KGP student, just don’t miss the tomorrow’s part. Sunil Handa is going to talk about “Consultancy” as a viable and lucrative career option to start with.
Are you attending it?



BTW, did I tell you about bindeshwar pathak (founder of Sulabh International), do check out about him from here.


Read my satirical take on entrepreneurship from here

PS: Going home tomorrow for two days. Yipeee!

IIT Despos, Orkut, SP-Election Manifesto...

What is the use of Orkut?




Ask this question to a IITdespo and he will treat you as if you have asked him the use of Chlormint.
As commonly used in Hindi, “Hum chlormint kyon khate hain?”
Let me list some of the benefits of eating chlormint:
1. After drinking liquor, or smoking cigarette (sutta). FYI, I don’t smoke or drink liquor. (if it concerns you!!!)
2. When you are on a date and it’s pretty obvious that you’ll have to.... I hope you get it.
3. And of course, you happen to like chlormint because of minty taste...which is least probable. However, I cannot rule it out completely as I even loved “Mahalacto”, when I was a kid. Did you also like it?
So, moral of this is never ever dare to ask a despo about the use of Orkut. Orkut and despos are heavily dependent on each other.
Hello, mate!!! Who is a despo?
Duh!!! Don’t ask this. You could be kicked for such negligence. Remember ignorance is never bliss. However, if you already have surrendered to my blog I must oblige you with the meaning of Despo.
Despo is such a guyor IITian who is in search of a girlfriend and desperately is hunting for the fairer sex but despise all his effort is still single and ready to mingle.
An average despo spends his most of the time loitering around girls’ hostel when he is offline and uses Orkut to hook up with some orkut-girl with foolish pickup lines. These pickup lines are often learnt similar to subscribing some feeds of Daily quotes' websites/blogs.
What does a Despo do at orkut?
He logs in to his orkut account, checks his scrapbook which never increases unless some old-friend scraps him “Abe Scrap kyun nahi karte?”, “Hi, Wassup” and all these useless scraps to which he replies within nanoseconds... after this he goes to few communities, hunts for female profiles, sends them friend requests using some pickup lines, then comes the most important part, he also has to go to his crush’s profile to read her scraps and check her album. These guys strive in a countably infinite no. of loop in such activities until they become a non-despo (highly probable) or committed by the gift of Orkut (very rare).
The desponess can be checked by asking some decent looking female orkut user about the type and number of friend requests she gets.
Some common pick up lines are:
1. If I could rearrange the alphabets then I would put u and I together.
2. You must be the reason for global warming because you are hot.
3. Did it hurt when u fell from heaven?
4. Is your dad a terrorist? Because you are a big bomb.

You can also check this screenshot by Ramya



This guy says "I'm a male....LOL"
I’ve a bad news for all these despos.
Samajwadi Party has recently released its election-2009 manifesto. They want to stop the use of computers in offices, and English because these two things are leading to reduction in jobs of less skilled people.
These despos should at least do something to save our country from these idiots who want to stop all our blogs, orkut profiles, use of English, and then they might say to use bullock-carts. How does an experienced but not necessarily literate group of politicians can come out with such a foolish, ill-researched election manifesto?
These less known politicians have just one mantra. Let the poor, uneducated common mass remain the same so that they can continually misguide them to secure a vote bank.
I appeal you despos, please do something not for country’s well-being but for yourself too.

PS: I have updated my other story blog "The Three Nerds"...read it from here.
PS: My Exams are starting from 20th April.
PS: I'll become 50% Engineer, if everything goes all right.
PS: Bye

Counter Strike and Time pass at Basic E.C.E LAB

Before coming to IIT Kharagpur, I had a perception that IITians will be surrounded by laboratory equipments and busy with research work 24x7.

Now being an IITian, I've realised that it was a myth. No doubt IITians are creative but in their own way. They do a lot of things which others can just dream of. Here are two videos you must watch.

For IIT KGP folks, watch these videos to get a relief from recent sad developments. This will also give a nice feeling to other guys who have their practical exams in coming days.

1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN8Njb2VUrc


2.1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kzuwTaraCk&feature=channel



These videos are brought to you by "Palkush Rai Chawla" and "Samar Rehman Patel" of IIT Kharagpur.

These videos make you realize that you can savour and enjoy each and every moment of your life be it irritating or boring.

You guys Rock!!!

PS: I also have my Basic E.C.E Lab test on 31st March.
PS: How were these videos?
PS: Finally, I've posted something funny, that too which is not mine.

Free Rapidshare accounts contest and "Advantages of short height "

I know this is not an ideal way to rant about my height. I was just wondering about my Short heightedness and tweeted it through my twitter profile.
“There are many benefits of short height :P”
One of my tall friend tweets rather changes his facebook status
“There are many benefits of being tall :P”
This inspired me to think of some benefits of short height and I’m here.
Googled Information
1. Shorter people have faster reaction times, greater ability to accelerate body movements, stronger muscles in proportion to body weight, greater endurance, and the ability to rotate the body faster. They are also less likely to break bones in falling.
2. Shorter people are also less likely to require surgery for herniated spinal disks. In addition, shorter people are less likely to break a hip from falling.
3. Another advantage of smaller people is that they are less likely to die in auto crashes. One study found that people weighing less than 132 pounds had the lowest risk of dying or suffering serious injuries compared to bigger people.
My Experiences
I’ve a lot of them related to short height. I’ll list only benefits as promised.
1. Once, I was travelling all alone for the first time in my life. I know everything happens for the first time in life but still that was a big occasion for me. I was nervous. Things were done for me. I didn’t have to pack my stuffs, my mum did it. I didn’t have to book tickets, my father did it. I thought this would be fun exploring everything while enjoying the scenic beauty outside the window of train alone. I’d a test to give, so I opened my course books and acted to be quite busy as my fellow travel-buddies were quite older than me. The train stopped in a station, some strange people entered the coach. Those were the species I feared a lot on train journeys and this time I’d to handle them. Any guesses, who were they?
No, they were not goons, robbers or vendors. They were frightening “eunuchs”.
I was quite aware of their menace since my childhood days. One of them came towards our seat and...
Eunuch: Aye mere salman khan kuch dena.....arrey handsome!!!....(in hindi)
These were words used for few people around me and though these are compliments but it seemed very different under such circumstances and one of them came towards me and started staring me. I was awfully frightened....
Me: Papa bahar gaye hain (in hindi).....which means My father has gone outside and I don’t have money.
And I’m happy that I’ve used this trick of using my short height and innocence to trick these eunuchs quite a lot.

2.I don’t need lots of space in the car/bus/Train or in general anywhere in this world.
3.I don’t have to worry about 'mind your head' signs.
4.I can squeeze through crowds easily :p

Being small rocks, you can act all little and helpless so people do things for you
***********************************************
Free Rapidshare accounts contest; Win 100$


As on 24th March the domain www.comptalks.com will complete its first year. So, my friend who is the owner of this domain is organising a Free Rapidshare Premium Account contest in which he will give away “Free Rapidshare accounts” to the contestants and they will be all new and only for you. The First Prize is open for all the subscribers of that blog and the last three prizes are only for the bloggers who have written about this competition. Bloggers will have extra advantage as they will have more chances to win the prizes.

The prizes are:

1st Prize: 1 year Rapidshare premium account worth 71$.
2nd Prize: 1 month Rapidshare account worth 9$.
3rd Prize: 1 month Rapidshare account worth 9$.
4th Prize: 1 month Rapidshare account worth 9$.
So the total prize money equals = 98$.

Now the criteria to win these prizes are:

You need to subscribe to that blog via email and verify the subscription; this is the primary condition for winning the prizes.
You need to write about this competition in your blog and give 2 links to this site, one to the homepage of Computer Talks and other to this post. This will give you chance to win the rest three prizes as well because they will be given to three bloggers.
Winners will be chosen by Random.org and last date to enter into the competition is 30th march

Yo Computer Talks(www.comptalks.com)

PS: Share your thoughts
PS: I should start doing something fruitful rather than watching a lot of movies.

Continuity and Discontinuity

The human form of life is always spending in analyzing the beauty of nature and its emulation. We may try everything and come to solutions of few problems but there is a difference between us and god which makes him almighty. The name is no misnomer for him; he always has an extra edge over us. The perfection of god can be realized by experiencing many phenomena. People have different perception levels and their level of understanding varies according to age, intelligence and education. So according to my observation the biggest drawback of humans lies in failing to make continuous things. According to me, we emulate to fool ourselves by modelling continuous things with contiguous behaviour.

Let me add proof to my words.

Digital imaging has been fascinating me for the last 2-3 years but I've not done much about it, though I know few things which are worth sharing. When you see an image which is digital, the first thing which should strike to your mind is why this is called digital. It makes sense when you try to enquire a little. Digital displays are made up from small dots called pixels. The digital image is built up from these dots. The smaller and closer the dots are together, the better the quality of the image. The story of pixels may be a little incomprehensible but if I can apprehend it then everybody can savour it.
I'll explain with the number line. When I was a kid, I thought there are numbers from 1 to as much you can think and also zero. When I studied in higher classes I realized that there are certain numbers which when added are capable of reducing the original value of a number, they are negative numbers. Negative numbers did trouble me a lot with their opposite behaviour and as a matter of fact I was never a good mathematics student. To add to my woes, I was informed that between any two numbers there are infinite numbers possible.
The above fact may distract you away from this post but please keep reading as if you have come so far then the rest of my post is also not so arid, banal and boring.
The number line story teaches us something, there are infinite numbers between any two numbers. Please bear this fact in your mind while reading rest of the post, it'll surely help. I know everybody must be aware of the visible spectrum of light. Light has seven visible components. However, Red, Green and Blue consists all the primary colours and their appropriate composition can give light all the different variations of colours that we can appreciate. This is capitalized in digital imaging.

Take an example with a pinch of salt.

A random point in space can be described with the help of three parameters, rather three coordinates. To be exact, it's horizontal and vertical distance, and the lateral shift with respect to your position. I know this is a bit difficult for non-science background readers to digest but this would be clear if you give it a little thought.

A red spot can be described as an area of complete red region. Red region means the colour of the region is red. Several distinct points in space can be joined to form a curvilinear figure. Two points if joined makes a straight line and hence forth. A straight line has many points, in fact, infinite points but only two points are sufficient to describe a straight line. This fact is not true for other figures. An area is also comprised of many points. The details of several points may give us an idea about the area; it may not be exact but could suggest something.
A red spot needs a description which is very simple. A large number of points with the same colour namely red makes the spot red. Similarly, for a green and blue spot we have infinite number of points with the same colour. However, a spot can be of various colours and if every point has the same colour, it makes the spot of that particular colour. Imagination can create wonders. Instead of every point of same colour if we have some points of red and others of other colours we will have a mixed colour spot rather an image. Every point is also known as pixel in scientific jargon. A pixel can depict any colour depending upon the ratio of red, blue and green components in it. In more common terms, the RGB value (Red-Green-Blue value) of a pixel decides the colour of the pixel. For example, if percentage of red, green and blue is equal then we get white light or a white spot. The colour of our skin can also be viewed by an appropriate composition of colours in various pixels. The resolution or rather the clarity of an image can be increased by increasing the number of dots known as pixels.



The above transition in the number of pixels gradually illustrates the effect of number of pixels in an image. In the first square, only one pixel is used which produces a blue spot. The second has four different types of colour regions due to four pixels. The number of pixels eventually increases to give sufficient approximation to the actual image when the number of pixels rises to 10000. One thing which should be kept in mind is the final image is not the exact continuous image but the best contiguous example in the above set of images. If we double the pixel numbers or reduce the individual size of pixels then the clarity or resolution will increase but our eyes treat the final image as the best one because of limit to the sensory perception.
Let us take a smooth transition from static images to moving images or videos. Digital videos are just yet another example of the contiguous behaviour. Our eyes can differentiate between 10 images in one second and if we try to observe more than ten, our eyes cannot function properly. In digital videos around 24 frames or images are smoothly exposed to our eyes and all are linked to each other such that we cannot differentiate between them and thus once again the contiguous model fools us and we term the phenomenon as moving pictures.

PS:What is your New Year resolution?
PS:This post also deals with resolution, albeit related to resolution of images.
PS:I know this post is not exhaustive but please let me know if you know anything more about this topic.
PS:Happy New year and do take a resolution.

Are you Bored?---What to do when you are bored??

Life is not so interesting. Every fifth day, you may feel bored and not find anything interesting or funny to do.
I have been through many such boring moments in my life and I’ll share what I do when I feel bored…….

1. Search something interesting on the internet……that’s very difficult!!!
2. Visit Orkut profiles of your friends……..you’ll not find anything interesting.
3. Visit random Orkut profiles of unknown persons…....you’ll find loads of interesting things.



Sometimes, it could well lead to something very funny and interesting.
Once, I did a similar sort of thing.
I visited profile of a girl and left a scrap.
Scrap :Do I know you??

After this a really interesting conversation followed….

Girl: This question should have been asked by me…….
Me: Yeah……but I thought you know me??
Girl: Why should I know you...? Are you a celebrity??
Me: Actually, Your profile picture resembled one of friends’….but I couldn’t remember
her name……So, I thought let’s see if you remember me….
Girl: I don’t have a twin sister…..and I don’t know you…..so please stop bugging me…
Me: BTW…….what do you do?
Girl: I’m doing my graduation and preparing for CAT-2009.
There was a moment to be seized…………..after that some general talks made us friends………….. I hope she(the girl) doesn’t read this……..but she never reads my blog.
I’m safe.
Announcement
I know that I’m not a good blogger. I do commit a lot of mistakes in my blog posts.
If anyone of you want to rectify me and willing to waste your valuable time with my blog and me, you are free to do so.
Steps
1. Send me an e-mail.
2. Subject: I want to bore you.
3. E-mail body: Write your name, qualification (just for fun), blogging experience.
4. E-mail address: ashishiitkgp4@gmail.com

PS: I thank unlisten for her suggestion about this post.
PS: I'm enjoying my holidays at home.
PS: I don't think our government will attack Pakistan.
PS: Do apply for the boring job.
PS: "Sorry Bhai" is a good timepass movie.